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A group of people at my place of work get together at lunchtime to talk and read the newspaper. Lately they have begun playing a game. It’s a fun and challenging game, but is usually complete well before the lunch hour is up, so it’s a nice game to play in a short time.

They use Scrabble letter tiles and all of the tiles are placed face down in the center of the table, then each player draws 7 letters. He or she then makes their own scrabble-like grid of words using as many of their letters as they can. The first person to use all of their letters calls “get two” and everyone chooses two more tiles from the center pile. They either add these to already existing words or redesign their grid with new word configurations and again, the quickest to use all of his letters calls “get two”. This repeats until all the tiles in the center are used and then a score is determined by subtracting the point value of the unused tiles from the point value of the tiles used in the word configurations. Players may challenge other players’ words, but this doesn’t happen very often. Play continues until it’s time to go back to work, then all scores are tallied and a winner declared. It’s just “bragging rights” as a prize.

I observed the play for a couple of days without taking part. One of the regular players is terrible — he struggles to make words quickly and always had negative points or a very low score. A couple of the other players are cut-throat and are usually the winner by a large margin over the rest.

On the second day, I quietly helped the poor player make a few words. He was still in no way going to win, but at least he wasn’t dead last and actually manged to use all his tiles once and be the one to call “get two” which I could tell made him happy.

One of the other players started loudly complaining of cheating (as far as I knew there wasn’t a rule against partnering, but I didn’t ask and the “game owner” never confirmed or denied that this was disallowed).

The game quickly ended when she said she didn’t like playing with “cheaters” despite the fact that she was tied with one other player and far, FAR ahead of any of the other players. My guy was next to last.

I feel badly but also torn as part of me wants to just tell her to get a life and part of me feels guilty for spoiling the game for the rest. I’m pretty much a stickler myself for following rules, but as I stated, I wasn’t aware of a rule against partnering and the “game owner” never said it was disallowed.

What do you think? Am I a terrible person for “cheating” and ruining the game? Should I apologize to all the other players?  What would you do in this situation?

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