I love words! I love speaking them, reading them, learning about them and playing games with them. I guess the label word nerd fits me. It’s kind of amazing how the game market has exploded with products geared towards people like me. Take a look at our word skills section and you can see that the market has moved way beyond Scrabble® and crossword puzzles.
If you are looking for gift ideas or new items for yourself, here are some of my recent favorites:
1. Hink Pink
This is probably one of my favorite games in the whole store! It makes a great travel game and is loads of fun for your game nights. It’s also a great way to engage your frontal, temporal and parietal lobes.
A Hink Pink is a word riddle answered with a pair of single-syllable rhyming words, Hinky Pinkies are two-syllable rhyming words and Hinkity Pinkities are three-syllable rhyming words. The goal is to guess the word pairs based on the clue you are given. For example: “ I have a hinky-pinky for-a manly tortilla chip snack with cheese”. The answer is a “macho nacho”.
2. Haikubes
I have used this one a lot in the past few weeks trying to inspire some creativity. After rolling the the dice for the direction of your poem, you must take words from the other rolled dice to create a haiku. (5 syllables in the first line-7 in the second and 5 in the third)
It was a particular hit at our Manager Holiday Kick-Off party too. Here’s one example:
we alternate fast
happy here following one
she tried this fortune
This is perfect for poets, writers, students and anyone else who likes to dork-out with words.
3. Word Freak
I’m intrigued by the whole “word nerd” tournament culture. Did you know there is a Pun Tournament? (Check out John Pollack’s The Pun Also Rises). Scrabble tournaments have become extremely competitive. The staff here at Marbles HQ have been passing around the book Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. It’s fascinating to learn how strict the rules are and how serious the players can be.
It has inspired us to start playing at work on Fridays. My coworkers are very competitive. (Lindsay Gaskins our CEO is the most competitive of the group. She can’t stand to lose). It’s been eye-opening to me since I have always just played scrabble for fun. As a kid I cared more about creating big or interesting words and using all of my tiles rather than my point value. I have definitely updated my strategy though. Even if I don’t win, at least I can beat our Inventory Analyst, Michael, who likes to make up words and wait to see if we will call his bluff and challenge him. His strategy usually backfires.
