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Absolut Scrabble

I was going through some old files the other day and found this interesting image, from the famous series of advertisements for Absolut Vodka:

I've written recently about being a Scrabble nut. This image appealed to me for that reason when I cut it out of a magazine in college.

It is sadly clear, however, that the designers of the ad perhaps knew the rules of the game, but were not true Scrabble nuts. Can you find the two places where an illegal word must have been played in order to create this game board? I'll leave the answer in the comments.

Comments

  1. J. Michael Andresen1:01 PM

    The easy one is that "zen" is not allowable. The second illegal play is only known by inference. "Legendary" is too long to have been played directly (9 letters, when a full rack contains just 7 tiles), yet there is no smaller intermediate word that would allow "legendary" to be built. None of the possible bridge words are legal plays: ry, ary, dary, ndary, endary, gendary, or egendary.

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  2. MT1:46 PM

    why couldn't player a play "legend," and later play b add the A, R, and Y? I know they couldn't built in two directions at once that way, but they could do it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. J. Michael Andresen9:12 AM

    The reason that LEGEND couldn't have been played first, followed by ARY: the board started with ICED and worked its way around to FORTY and then LEGENDARY. There was no word to connect just LEGEND to the rest of the board without the ARY. It would only work to start from the Y.

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