David Cohen’s Scrabblegrams are having a moment. We’ve featured a lot of his work in the last issue of The Journal of Wordplay, and he’s got a book collection out that I highly recommend.
The Guardian, one of the world’s most trusted news sources, is no stranger to puzzle coverage, so when it runs a pair of articles called “The Greatest Wordplay Puzzle of All Time,” well, that carries some weight! (That statement should probably be considered the op-ed opinion of columnist Alex Bellos than an official statement by The Guardian proper. But even so.)
First things first: a “Scrabblegram” is a short composition, 100 letters long, that could be spelled out using the tiles from a game of Scrabble. Two of those tiles are “blanks” which could stand for any letter, but the other 98 are fixed. Every Scrabblegram must have at least one Q, X, J, and Z, two Bs, Cs, Hs, and Ys, and so on.
If that sounds challenging, it is! To get a sense of how hard, try doing it yourself with this online Scrabblegram-maker’s helper. If you’ve built a successful Scrabblegram, it should have nothing left in the “You must incorporate these letters” section and two red letters—no more, no less—showing up in the “You must get rid of these letters” section.
In the first article, Dave offers some additional good-sense tips, from the practical (have a plan for the Q and J, balance consonants and vowels throughout) to the philosophical (choose a topic meaningful to you, be kind to yourself and have fun!). The highlight of the two pieces, though, are a pair of Dave’s Scrabblegrams that break down into crossword-style clues…with another pair of Scrabblegrams serving as the answers.
Check this out:
Answers: PARADISE LOST, KONNICHIWA, FORGIVE AND FORGET, MERCURY, JEZEBEL, SALVAGED, TRANQUILITY, WIPEOUT, AMBIDEXTROUS, A HOLE IN ONE.
And again:
Answers: THIRTEEN, FREE PARKING, JAMBALAYA, DEVOUT, ZOOKEEPER, QUICHE LORRAINE, FAWN, DIVIDED, TOXICOLOGIST, GAUNTLY, BUSINESSWOMAN.
I don’t know if “greatest” is something you can quantify, but these are pretty great, all right. I’d give an example of my own, but honestly, I’m still figuring out what to do with that J…