MTN Televised Scrabble Archive

I've been hooked on MTN's televised scrabble since Kate Bauer and I stumbled across it a few weeks back. The only on-line mention I can find of it is an old review in a student paper.

I'm thinking of getting a group of folks together to play as a team semi-regularly, but while that's getting setup I decided to start archiving the games, because that's the sort of thing I do, I guess.

I started out by looking to see if there already was a standard scrabble game notation. There are a few, but none of them are particularly well thought out. The most commons seems to be the log2 format. It's human readable, but pretty fiddly syntax wise.

Last weeks game as a log2 file starts like this:

Hamil                                   Mpls
  8h  CARP             +16   16  MIXIWOD   i7  WAX             +25   25
   h8 COPE             +17   33  IIMODTL 11e   MODEL           +16   41
  9g  FOX              +17   50  IITEYTG 10d   GEY             +28   69

In addition to creating a log2 file for the game, I created a first cut at an on-line HTML visualization as found here: https://ry4an.org/scrabble/games/2005-06-21/ The image on that page:

board

was created with the help of the board display tool by Graham Toal.

Once I get that page into a format I like, I'll probably create a CGI that converts log2 files to HTML visualizations on the fly. I, however, definitely don't have time for something like that now.

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