Nick's Café Canadien

Last Friday I got two rounds of Scrabble in with Dan Lazin of The Edmonton Journal, formerly of The Gateway. I will let him tell the story when the time comes (and direct you all to it accordingly), but know this: I still can’t believe I let him get away with SWANEES* for 80 points. The convenient excuse is that we were both thinking of SWAMIES. Fortunately, that was not the game that was photographed.

There is a word in that rack, WAENESS, but I do not recall there being a place for it at the time.

Remember Vote Out Anders? Leave it up to none other than Steve Smith to top it with a guerrilla campaign of his own: Defeat Jung-Suk Ryu. Do not be fooled, citizens: Ryu, an occasional reader of this blog (at some point or another, anyway) who has accumulated a few headlines by being the token nineteen-year-old running for Edmonton City Council in Ward 5, bears no relation to the dragon-punching, ha-do-ken-throwing karate champ of the same name – and that is the least of his hoodwinkings.

As mentioned on the site above, one thing that falls under scrutiny is Mr. Ryu’s frequent claims to have won university debating awards at the national level. This appears to be in reference to the Top Novice lamp awarded to him at the 2003 Hugill Cup, which I recall to be the direct consequence of both a Chris Jones judging decision in Round 5 and the disqualification of the actual highest-scoring novice at the tournament, Sharon’s pink rubber duck Bismarck. Sometimes I think debating should follow Scrabble’s example and award a prize for the Most Outrageous Phoney.

Unfortunately, Jung-Suk has removed his own campaign weblog, which is a tragic loss to those of us who derive hours of wild amusement from the obliviously shameless self-promotion of others. But replace a thoroughly guilty pleasure with a dissection akin to a Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I’d call that a net gain.

Lastly: I know I pointed this out last time, but is this the greatest blog ever or what? When the linguistics professors there are not busy busting malaprops they cover everything from lie detection to the phonetic sexual attraction of names. Just what advantage does ‘Nick’ confer?

Last night, on a whim, I decided to whip up a Google search for “Dan Brown” and “prose” to see if others find his narrative style, if you can call it that, as irritatingly bad as I thought it was. As it turns out, this is exactly the search string you should punch in if you are exclusively looking for negative reviews.

My favourite one of the bunch – at least, in the first few pages of results – comes from the linguistics journal Language Log, which is the best weblog I have discovered in weeks, if not months. Geoff Pullum eviscerates the first page of The Da Vinci Code in a level of detail so meticulous that it captures down to the very word exactly what it was that bothered me about the biggest publishing hit this side of The South Beach Diet – the first page, at any rate. It is still a good indication of what the entire novel is like.

It was high time I found a new blog to satisfy my linguiphilic tendencies, now that Adam Pauls learning Japanese is winding down. There is some fascinating material on that site, and knowing the readership that regularly drops by here, many of you will probably want to read about gender-neutral word choice and the Persons Case, then follow it up with a contrary opinion, which results in debate.

Returning for a moment to the subject of Dan Brown, I think he is fast becoming my second-favourite outrageously successful author to pick on relentlessly, for the same deserved reasons as the one ranked first. By the way, that would be Robert Jordan of The Wheel of Time infamy, whom I like to call “the Bill the Butcher of fantasy literature” because of how he hacks away at his craft with abandon.

At first glance, Brown and Jordan could not be any more different. Brown writes chapters that average two or three pages in length; Jordan spends ten pages at a time describing what a random ageless Aes Sedai wizard-chick from the Plaid Ajah is wearing on this fine evening. Brown keeps a breakneck pace going by going from event to event with only the odd longwinded pseudo-historical lecture in between, whereas the only thing breakneck about reading Jordan is what happens if it makes you fall asleep on something sharp.

But fundamentally, they have the same bad habits. Both of them binge on perspective-hopping in addition to italicized passages of internal monologue that justify everything writing instructors say about the technique being outright cheating in the face of the limits of the third person. Neither of them have any regard for the old adage “show, don’t tell.” Both of them write characters that are the spitting image of what fan fiction circles refer to as “Mary Sues”: the heroes are fantasies of self-insertion that regularly cross paths with beautiful and intelligent princesses, and invariably make out with them at the end of the day.

Both of them use a device that is almost identical in its respective implementations, which are therefore identically annoying. It always involves a master and his servant, typically belonging to a Generic Fanatical Organization (GFO), with the master telling the servant that he is about to reveal his evil plot and assign him a whole new set of nefarious orders. Sometimes it even ends with an ellipsis; i.e. “Now I will tell you about my evil plot, dot-dot-dot.” We, the readers, never actually hear the plan, but we are subjected to a sentence along the lines of, “As the servant listened to the evil plot, he smiled, for it would be an honour to serve his ingenious master and the GFO’s noble faith.” End of chapter.

It’s cheesy enough as it is, and these guys do it all… the… smegging… time.

And despite all this, both of them are good enough at dropping breadcrumbs of unsolved mysteries that one is compelled to keep on reading, just to see if the authors could answer some burning questions already. To Brown’s credit, he drags the reader through the mud at a hundred knots by dropping these unanswered puzzles and revealing them bit by bit. As for Robert Jordan, there is a clear explanation out there of why anyone ever stuck with him after the first few volumes. It is because he ends the fifth Wheel of Time volume, The Fires of Heaven, with a shocking and anonymous murder that contains all the excitement that was lacking for much of the preceding eight hundred pages of fluff. It’s last-minute, last-chapter desperation plays to keep the audience’s attention like this one that compels people to keep on buying his books. Jordan is through ten now, and from what I hear, he has yet to even mention the incident again.

With these two authors, we have two major arguments at the ready for any aspiring English teacher to emphasize the value of revision. If anything, The Da Vinci Code and the books in the Wheel of Time series (the ones I’ve read, anyway – I quit after seven) feel like first or second drafts, refined and admittedly intriguing plot summaries that go completely unsupported by any semblance of storytelling ability.

They also have generic names, though ‘Robert Jordan’ is a pseudonym.

This is itself a point of interest, as Dan Brown is also the name of a CBC Viewpoint columnist who writes about much the same kind of things I do – movies, comic books, Dan Brown, you name it. Of the two Browns, one is an excellent writer. I would recommend his article entitled “I am not Dan Brown” over The Da Vinci Code any day of the week.

On a completely different note, I saw Garden State last night. It is one of those movies that is difficult to write about, and not because I am at all uncertain as to how good an impression it left. Zach Braff’s self-starring directorial debut is marvelous, which makes it very hard to criticize, but what makes it so great has a lot to do with how it unfolds and tells its own story, which makes it very hard to praise to high heaven without robbing a reader of some of the pleasure that the movie offers on its own. Not a week ago I was complaining about how devoid of truly amazing movies this year has been with the exception of a few key sequels (though to be fair, I regret never getting around to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I am told is wonderful). After seeing Garden State, that simply isn’t true anymore. I implore you to go and see the movie while it is still in relatively wide release, so I can talk about some of the very specific things that struck me about it without spoiling the experience.

But I will stop for now, as Garden State is very well written indeed, and has no business dawdling around in this post.

Back in June when the title of the sixth Harry Potter book was announced, I inquired: “Who is the Half Blood Prince – and is there, or is there not a hyphen?” At long last, we have an answer to the second question, and it will indeed be Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, “half-blood” hyphenated as it is in the books themselves.

While on the subject of correct punctuation, I am aware that I do not practice it on this site. I refer not to the placement of periods and commas, but how I do not differentiate between em and en dashes, or curly quotes and primes. Part of it is because I have enough trouble remembering web-ready identities like & (&) and é (é) to even begin using the numerical ones on the fly. In fact, I see the misuse of dashes, apostrophes and quotations marks as a larger problem within society as a whole that can only be corrected via better keyboard designs. Add quotation mark and em dash keys, I say. Make them mappable to HTML identities. Take Microsoft’s automatic entry of em dashes, curly quotes and correct apostrophes and have them default to Unicode characters rather than proprietary Windows ones, not that this will ever actually happen, given Microsoft’s predilection to all things proprietary.

At some point or another, I might correct the non-ASCII extended characters littered throughout the site to their corresponding identities so the blasted thing validates properly, but the day I find time to comb through every post to do this will also be the day I do a table-free redesign and move to my own server; in other words, not for a while.

Interesting scoop on the Nintendo DS today, stating that it has a square port with an as-yet-undisclosed secret purpose. Nintendo is also reportedly considering releasing the device in multiple colours, in which case you can expect me to head straight for the purple (sorry, ‘indigo’) model, unless they release a retro-styled NES gamepad design like the one that graced the Game Boy Advance SP.

One minor detail requires clarification. I quote: “The stylus pen is going to be connected to the back.” Does that mean it merely slides into a stylus-holding slot at the back of the unit, as one would assume, or is it physically attached to the device itself – say, by a retractable cord? If it is the former, I can guarantee that Nintendo is going to be receiving a lot of warranty calls for replacement styli. Not to make overly sweeping generalizations, but the target consumer that will be purchasing and playing the Nintendo DS is more likely to lose a stylus than a Palm-piloting businessman. A stylus connected to the DS would make a lot of sense as long as the cord is long and flexible enough to not impede gameplay, yet short enough so as to avoid getting all tangled up.

The Sign of the Apocalypse du jour comes courtesy of the official website to the video game BloodRayne:

Rayne Makes Her PlayBoy Debut

If you felt teased by her sexy Girls of Gaming cover, then this new feature art is going to blow your mind! Rayne is 100% topless and smokin’ hot in the October issue of Playboy magazine. This is a first in videogame history and trust us when we say that Rayne does not disappoint. The magazine hits newsstands in early September so here’s a great excuse to get a copy!

Keep in mind that this is an imaginary computer-generated vampire chick we are talking about. Who is in direr need of getting out more, the BloodRayne team behind all this or the kids who will go out and actually buy the issue? (And yes, I said ‘kids’.)

You know you are behind schedule on the path to being someone important in the world when your peers include Olympic gold medallists.

Yesterday – as almost the whole country should know by now, even Summer Olympics hermits such as yours truly – gymnast Kyle Shewfelt claimed Canada’s first gold medal in Athens. This came as a surprise, not in the sense that I didn’t expect the representatives of my dear country to ever get back on their feet, but because Mr. Shewfelt was one of my elementary school classmates at Queen Elizabeth. (Queen Elizabeth Jr./Sr. High, that is, not the adjacent Queen Elizabeth Elementary… it’s complicated. Suffice to say, that was back when GATE was all housed in one school, not eight.) We never knew each other very well, and it is unlikely he remembers me, but he looks pretty much exactly the same today as he did eleven years ago, aside from having hit puberty sometime along the way. Back then he had a reputation for being the resident gymnast, much like how many of the other students had reputations for their respective special hobbies and super powers à la Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, only they haven’t won Olympic medals, now have they. Somewhere in this paragraph lies the moral of the story, that indeed, real people around you can be national heroes. Then again, they could also go into politics.

The closest I’ve gotten to winning an Olympic gold in the past few days, or an award of any sort, is the Most Outrageous Successful Phoney prize at an eight-round tournament I played yesterday, in which I finished second place in my division with a 5-3 (+381) record. At big events like the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship, this earns nothing less than a statuette of a horse’s ass, but all that one-day mini-tournaments bestow are bragging rights – and what bragging rights they are. I played BETRAYS for 99 points just the turn before, but it was challenged off because I tacked it onto an ill-advised hook in a desperation play, putting the S on CAW to make SCAW*. Then my opponent opened the triple line by playing PEES, but it was too low for me to play BETRAYS with the E making EPEES, so instead I confidently dumped the other word I spotted. No, not BARYTES. At 97 points on a triple-word score, BREASTY* is a horse’s ass of a play if I ever saw one.

The great thing about Scrabble is that unlike gymnastics, it is one of those things that you can master without having to start at the age of six. Athletics are not alone in differing; despite not being quite so intertwined with physical conditioning, the visual and performing arts are harder to get into than one would think, should one have no experience prior to leaving high school. The stars we hear about in all these fields invariably started early with a premonition of a destiny to fulfil and pursued it from the beginning. As somebody who is drawing-impaired but holds private aspirations of a brief foray into animation someday, I challenge thee: just try to get into an art college that does not expect you to come in fully armed with a portfolio at the ready. Entry level it ain’t.

There are a few exceptions, of course. The film trade, with the considerable resources that it demands, offers next to no opportunity to get hands-on experience as a child or adolescent. Novelists almost exclusively start late in life, though who knows how many years they spend trying to nail a breakthrough manuscript. And correct me if I’m wrong, but a few sports – curling, for instance – are more amicable to latecomers, though playing a few bonspiels in youth clubs undoubtedly offer a head start.

In most cases, though, it is already too late to shift gears into a new pursuit. Now go do something useful in your life before it’s too late.

This is going to be one of those entries where I step aside and let the more qualified do the talking.

Throughout the week, Slate has been running a five-part feature on the National Scrabble Championship by Division 1 player Dan Wachtell. It’s more of a bird’s-eye-view, or at least a Division-1-player’s-eye-view, of the action in New Orleans and covers a great deal about the Scrabble culture that I did not. For example, I have yet to defeat Scrabble legend Brian Cappelletto, still considered by some to be the best player in North America. Wachtell also imparts some wisdom about the strength of second-language players, the world-class Thai contingent in particular. Naturally, one of the entries also concerns the LEZ scandal. If you liked my Scrabble coverage earlier this month, get reading, because this is even better and a lot more accessible.

For those of you interested in where video games are headed with Nintendo and Sony’s new portable systems, right now there is no better analysis than the “State of the Handheld Industry: DS vs. PSP” feature at GameCube Advanced. It features interviews with some of the biggest names in both electronic gaming journalism and software development, some heavily favouring one system, the others undecided. At times the views and predictions about certain issues are so disparate that the only certainty is, somebody will turn out wrong.

This isn’t the only fight Sony has been picking lately. It is one of the companies that has pledged support for the Blu-ray disc format (BD-ROM), one of the two competing specifications vying to succeed DVDs as standard optical media. Regardless of who wins, format wars are always a headache for consumers; every now and then, what we really need is a side-by-side comparison of state-of-the-art technology.

There is a hilarious visual gag in Finding Nemo so subtle that I never caught it until I watched it for at least the fifth or sixth time just yesterday. Pay close attention to the ornaments in the saltwater tank where Nemo ends up; among them is a human skull. Next to the skull is a sign that appears in only two or three quick shots in the entire movie. Read it, and remember, the tank is in a dentist’s office.

A week ago at the Ziff Davis Electronic Gaming Summit, Reggie Fils-Aime of Nintendo delivered a speech about the company’s portable gaming strategy; IGN has the transcript. It clarifies a lot about Nintendo’s controversial philosophy that higher specs and better graphics are a technological dead end, and new frontiers in interface design are the way to go. “While we’ve steadily improved the technology of the Game Boy,” he says, “Nintendo has never considered itself in the technology business. We are in the entertainment business.”

This guy is right on the money. Observe:

On the other hand, if we are talking about a hard core 20-something gamer, the question of consumer desire becomes more pertinent – just what, exactly, does that avid player want? The initial thought is pretty obvious – if they love Grand Theft Auto on their PlayStations… they should love it just as much on the PSP, right? Well, leaving aside the issue of specific content not jumping platforms very well, game developers have to consider how these older consumers will play. The vast majority of older hard core players have made a leisure time commitment to gaming. Your mother may play solitaire or hearts for ten minutes at a time. Your most passionate gaming buddies probably play for entire nights or weekends at a time… because that’s what they love.

Now, consider those games they play to immersion – Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, Zelda – and ask yourself this. Are they away from home for sufficient blocks of uninterrupted free time to repeat that immersion on a handheld device? How many 20 year olds really take regular three hour plane flights? Eleven-year-olds spend half-day car trips in the back seat, playing Game Boy. 21-year-olds spend half-day car trips in the front seat, driving. Even if those blocks of time were available to them, how many older gamers wouldn’t really rather wait and play those games at home, lying on the couch, blasting away on their big screens?

I give the Nintendo DS a fair amount of coverage here and virtually none for the PSP, and there’s a reason why I am excited about one and not the other. It is because the PSP is and fully intends to be a Game Boy that plays PlayStation games (albeit on an absolutely gorgeous display). There is nothing that it offers that cannot be done with a home console, except for additional features like music playback. Now, it’s no secret that part of why the PlayStation 2 sold so well is that it doubled as a DVD player at a time when most consumers did not have a DVD player, but were about to purchase one. Portable music players, on the other hand, are really nothing new. Nokia discovered this last year with their game-playing phone, the N-Gage: people would much rather buy a superior phone and a superior game system as separate, specialized units. This is why a hardware-driven approach falls flat on its face.

One may point out that the Game Boy is subject to a similar criticism: that in terms of pure gameplay, there is nothing that distinguishes it from what home systems can do aside from its inherent portability. That is only half true, because here, the innovations are driven by software developers. These range from using the unit as a control pad with a private screen in Four Swords Adventures and Crystal Chronicles to, say, monitoring and tuning your car. Still, it is quite correct that some Game Boy titles are just as playable on a TV screen, if not moreso. Take the phenomenal Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, for instance. As a traditional RPG where you have to play in long stretches to get from one save point to the next, it’s far more playable on the Game Boy Player accessory that puts it on a television and routes control to the wireless GameCube controller. Most of the biggest titles on the GBA are re-releases of NES and SNES classics, but they are still more playable on the old systems for which they were designed. (Part of it is because of the GBA’s lack of X and Y buttons, but that’s a different story.)

The thing that makes the DS so exciting is that almost everything about it takes advantage of the fact that you can take it with you and hold it right in your hands. You cannot implement two independent screens and stylus control on a console that plugs into a television set, any more than you can use a Duck Hunt Zapper gun on a cell phone. That means we are going to have new software that takes advantage of PDA-style features, like touch keyboards to replace that age-old method of scrolling with the directional pad to select each individual letter. At the same time, it sports the most effective button design of any system in history, the diamond/shoulder layout of the Super Nintendo controller that is simple enough to be intuitive, but consists of just enough buttons to play Street Fighter II.

Heck, you can play Scrabble on this thing, so long as Hasbro doesn’t screw up the software license. Put the rack and board on the touchscreen with a drag-and-drop interface, and use the other screen for scores, timers, tile tracking and the whole gamut.

There is one little problem, though: Hasbro doesn’t own the software license.

Since the acquisition of Hasbro Interactive in 2001, Scrabble has been owned by Infogrames, which has since renamed itself Atari to fool the unsuspecting into feeling nostalgic. As was pointed out at the Nationals town meeting, this is the major stumbling block that has prevented the rise of an online Scrabble network tied directly into the competitive world of the National Scrabble Association. Instead, the independent Internet Scrabble Club reigns supreme.

The other problem with the official distributions of Scrabble software is that they use the censored dictionary. While on a PC there are ways to edit the dictionary data under the table, cartridges are a different story. With the biggest dictionary revision in ten years just over the horizon, it is not the best time to buy a Scrabble program anyhow. But this is the part where in a stroke of genius, one suddenly recalls that the DS is Wireless LAN-enabled. Why not connect to a central server, download a dictionary update and flash it like a game save file?

The possibilities are fascinating, and it would take a lot to stop the DS from being the next big thing. Underpromotion and overpricing of software are culprits to watch. As Fils-Aime points out in his speech, software is the one determinant of success when you boil things down. The Game Boy sold because of Tetris, and the Game Boy Color sold because of Pokémon. Build the hits, and they will come.

I still think the DS version of Animal Crossing is the one to watch. The original for the GameCube is a niche title with a word-of-mouth cult following, but almost everything in its design would work even better on a portable system with a touchscreen that you play in bursts. But one area where Sony has consistently beaten Nintendo is promotion and marketing. Advertisements like the Santa Claus commercial for the PlayStation 2 are the ones that get the public to spend. Right now, the Nintendo DS is almost unknown outside of circles that read game industry news or University of Alberta student blogs. This needs to change.

Final note goes to Square/Enix: get your act together and work on Chrono Trigger DS already.

I’ve watched the feature-length Pixar movies several times apiece, and just when I think I’ve caught everything, they continue to surprise me with the sheer depth of the artists’ care and attention to detail. Most of the hidden Easter eggs that I came across for the first time in this week’s pass are fairly common knowledge as far as obscure trivia goes, like how the bookshelf behind Woody when he delivers his “moving buddy” briefing in Toy Story sports several hardcovers entitled after Pixar’s pre-Toy Story shorts, Tin Toy and Knick Knack among them. But while watching A Bug’s Life again last night I noticed something that, as far as a quick flip through the major search engines and film sites I’ve found, nobody has made a point of catching before.

You know the scene where the circus bugs, freshly fired, are all having a few drinks in the empty Low Fat Lard can that serves as a bar? Listen carefully. In the background is the faint and familiar sound of a honkytonk piano playing “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. That, my friends, is the Pixar difference.

Hypothetical question for the experts: your opening rack is Al’s all-consonant license plate from Toy Story 2. How many tiles do you exchange, and which ones?

Back at the Scrabble tournament earlier this month I mentioned a new game board design that I procured for beta-testing purposes. Before I comment on the board itself, I want to go into a little bit of background, as the story of how this board came into being is an interesting one.

Right now the most upscale Scrabble set commercially available in North America is Hasbro’s Deluxe Edition. For all competitive purposes, it’s useless. If you go to a typical Scrabble tournament, everybody brings their own gear, and under optimal circumstances you would be hard-pressed to find anything from the Deluxe Edition box. Nationals, however, operates differently; out of logistic concerns, the tournament employs a standard board at every table fresh out of the box.

This raised the ire of many a player back at the 2002 Nationals in San Diego, as these boards are clearly inadequate for tournament play. The ridges around the individual letter spaces, designed to hold the tiles in place, don’t hold the tiles in place; turn the board, and they are in for a slip-slide ride. Spinning the board is also a problem. With about an inch-wide bevel around the square board, it is all too common for a corner to inadvertently knock over your opponent’s rack, should he place it too close. This is not an issue for casual players, because the Deluxe Edition comes with a storage ring that doubles as a turntable support, which raises the board high enough that toppling racks is not an issue. Tournament players cannot do the same, as it is against the rules. Yes, there is indeed a rule that says the board must be low enough so the number of tiles on your rack is visible to the other player, so one can spot overdraws or plan out-plays in the endgame.

The fallout of these complaints was that the National Scrabble Association talked to Hasbro and consulted on the design of a new tournament board to eliminate some of the problems with the Deluxe set. It was scheduled for a surprise unveiling as the board that would be used at this year’s Nationals in New Orleans.

That did not account for shipping delays en route to New Orleans from the manufacturers in China, and the boards arrived on the last day of the tournament.

Instead, a board was bestowed upon every winner of Round 30, the last game of the tournament aside from the Wright-Gibson final. The new design’s debut in tournament play was in the best-of-five final itself, and you can see a photo of it here as it looked after the deciding Game 3.

In the two weeks since the tournament I have had the opportunity to play a few casual games with the new board. While Victoria player Thana Kamabanonda covers pretty much what I think in this post, I have a few things to address.

The new design is a huge improvement on the Deluxe set. The ridges are high – perhaps too high, as I observed that it took longer than usual to slot the tiles into place when making a play. But once they are in, they stay in. The turning mechanism is stable and avoids raising the surface too high. The board is thin enough for easy transport in a tote bag, though the wooden framing adds some weight and makes it heavier than it looks. Gone is the outer bevel of the Deluxe Edition, though there is a wide margin on one side sporting the Scrabble logo and the tile count, so it does feel big enough for a square board that knocking racks over is still something to be cautious about.

The set comes with two wooden racks that match the frame, but these are just asking for trouble. They are too narrow and too steep, and tiles look like they might fall off at any moment. At Nationals a lot of people will bring their own racks anyway, but if Hasbro is actually planning to sell this thing, they need better racks now.

I am unsure as to the look of the board – specifically, how the plastic surface is the dull grey of a Civil War ironclad. Let’s be honest: it’s ugly, and it doesn’t match the frame. Aesthetically, it looks unfinished. Now, in the context of a game, this does not matter so much, and the fact that the background is as dull as it is actually evades excessive glare and other distractions. But if Hasbro wants to send this to store shelves, it is in serious need of colour coordination.

I still prefer my personal board, a circular wooden one with a green marble-pattern finish made by Calgary player Ross Stevenson, which I keep in a padded Sabian cymbal case. Round boards are an indispensible comfort once you play with them frequently, though they are a bit difficult to lug around. Also, if Hasbro wants to sell a line of boards geared towards competitive types, they might as well make it a complete out-of-the-box experience. Right now, the woodcarved tiles in every Scrabble set on the market are against tournament regulations, because the grooved surfaces are an invitation to cheat. The tile bags are also poorly made; mine ripped at the seams not long ago, but I replaced it with a more spacious flock bag with a cylindrical bottom, far less prone to wear and tear. If you are going to sell a tournament board, sell it with flat plastic tournament tiles, stable racks and a better bag. Omitting the clock I can understand, as a standard digital timer like the SamTimer or Adjudicator is by far the most expensive part of a complete tournament-ready Scrabble set, but everything else needs to be there. There’s no point in targeting competitive players if after buying the set, they still have to run over to Word Gear and replace half their equipment.