'SMATH, Sept. 21, 2002

Marcy and I played 'SMATH, a Scrabble-like game where the tiles are numbers and mathematical operations, and instead of making words you make equations.

The completed board. The flash kind of washed things out, but the pictures without the flash were too dark. The main thing that's hard to see in this picture is that every tile has a value on the lower right corner; most tiles are 1, but the equals signs are 0 (they can be used freely from a common stack), the multiply signs are 2, and I think the 7s and divide signs are the most valuable at 4. The parentheses are clear tiles that can be laid over the number tiles; they are also taken from a common stack, like the equals signs, but we ran out of them fairly early, so I think it would be better to give each player half of them at the beginning of the game. We also made a house rule that you can't put more than one parentheses over a tile, because they're not really made to stack.

As you can see, it's pretty easy to make long equations (you get ten tiles on your rack, and a 25 point bonus for using all of them in a turn) and to extend existing equations by multiplying or dividing by 1 or adding or subtracting 0. There are also 10 blanks, which are maybe even more helpful than the blanks in Scrabble. Also, many of the equations reduced to 0=0 or 1=1; I think it might be a good idea to add the actual value of the equation to its score, to encourage more creative equations.

One interesting consequence of the way equations are built is that you can't make parallel plays like in Scrabble: you can only extend an equation or make a new one crosswise. This means that the board is sparser, and about 2/3 of the way through the game, we were running out of space on the board to make equations. Also, since we had run out of parentheses (which can serve as multiplication by putting sub-expressions next to each other), the equations had to alternate number-operator-number, and often the equations already on the board were mis-aligned, so that new equations couldn't be played across them.

Overall, we enjoyed the game, although I think it might need some tweaks in the tile mix, or the layout of the bonus spaces on the board. It's a neat idea, though, for those who object to the wordlist memorization required for Scrabble.