Big vocabularies don't scare us one bit around here. As a matter of fact, we love them, and the bigger the better! Seriously, we hope you have as much fun playing One Up! as we've had making it.

Calling all vocabularians! Just like last year, we'll post a One Up!® 'game situation' every month so all you doubledomes out there can show everyone how brilliant and quick you are.

Here's all you need to know now to play: take one or more letters from the center and add them to an existing word to make a new word.

Since there won't be a 'right' answer, we'll be looking for originality, wit and wow! The winner will receive a One Up!® and have his or her name put in the drawing for the Grand Prize at the end of the year.

Share on Facebook | Here's my magnificent stab at it...

We thought that it might be fun to have April's winner decided by our readers. Who do you think, Devorah or Rado?

Dear Mr. Write,

It's Devorah Pashev writing you on behalf of myself and hubby Rado Pashev. Here are our April 2012 One-Up! Contest submissions.

As past winners of your contest, we both love playing One Up! and also solving anagrams. Therefore, it's no coincidence that both our submissions this month consist of anagrammatical pairs.

I am starting with SOOT and adding a full CUP to make the pair: OCTOPUS / COPOUTS. My cute Rado is starting with DRONE and adding (what else?) CUTE to make the pair COUNTERED / RECOUNTED.

Once you pare down all the contest submissions, we hope our pair of pairs will lead to a pair of victories for at least one of us!

Devorah Pashev (and Rado Pashev)

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March's winner, Laura B., sent this single word entry in: "Tholed". I thought it was a typo, until I looked it up. Nice. Hat tip to David Nylin, who also listed this as one of his entries. Keep 'em coming, brainiacs!

For the February 2012 One Up! Contest, we had a tough decision since there were so many great entries, but we finally picked Linda Stephens, who sent this beaut in:

Hi Timothy,

It's your only three-time winner, Linda Stephens, once again. I was hoping last month's contest would have added more championships to my resume, but I'm glad to see that the prizes went to a worthy cause instead. So, here's my attempt to become a four-time victor with this month's contest.

The inspiration for my February entry is the rainy weather I've experienced during my travels over the past few weeks. I'll start with R_LES and make the Uppity Tile into an L. With the aid of A BUM from the tile pool, I make the word UMBRELLAS.

Hope you "don't rain on my parade", and make me a four-time winner!

Sincerely,

Linda "3-Time" Stephens

Editor's Note: Guess Linda'll have to change her business card again.

For the January 2012 One Up! Contest, we decided to forego a winner and instead donated a bunch of One Up!s to our men and women in uniform as part of our Operation Brain Storm.

One Up!® everyone on your list.

We are thrilled that Real Simple magazine selected One Up!® as a 'Snow-Day Staple', which has inundated us with new orders. Thanks to all you word snobs/nerds/lovers for all your enthusiasm and support — let it snow!

How to One Up!®

Unbelievably, not everyone knows how to play One Up!®, so we decided to have our interns make a 'How to' video that even they can understand:

First and foremost, follow the instructions. But creativity and a level playing field are sometimes just as important. At our house, we have our own variations that make it fairer for all of us to play together - we let the kids (ages 10, 9, 8) make any words; my wife can only make 4 letter words (which she's really good at!); and I can only make 5 letter words or longer. Piece of cake.

We've heard from 2 different people saying they subtract the first 2 letters of each word when adding up the score (instead of one), which gives even more weight to superior thinking ability. An old friend of ours who is always flying back and forth between L.A. and New York for business tells us that he has 5-minute speed games before meetings, or on the set between takes, and it really gets everyone's synapses fired up. The too-cool-for-schoolers who used to be late or were bent gaga over their Blackberrys all the time, he tells us now actually show up early and eager to sharpen their wits!

A League of Their Own.

We received this email from Bob Gillis, author of Bob's Bible (a Scrabble word reference guide) and member of the National Scrabble Association's dictionary committee, and realized what we always suspected was true is true - we're complete amateurs:

Mr. Write,

This is essentially the after hours game of choice at Scrabble tournaments. We take two (or more) sets of Scrabble Tiles and place them face down, mix and everyone slides some near themselves.

Typical minimum is 7 letters though intermediate players may play 5.

Our rules for "steals" has evolved a bit -- to steal a word, the new word must not contain the old word inside it (in order) even if you hypothetically remove letters. In other words, the word cannot be stolen if it is an extension or an insertion or combination thereof. Occasionally this eliminates a few fairly nice plays, but it makes a straightforward enforceable no-quibble rule.

We sometimes play with blanks as well, but they must be accompanied by two non blank letters and only used for steals of a length at least 3 longer than the word being stolen.

Our scoring is based on sum of squares... first we match like length words (since they cancel out) and the remaining are scored as the square of the word length. However, the winner is usually obvious and so most games are never scored.

I can remember seeing the 14 letter word tatterdemalion (aka ragamuffin) played at the 2008 Boston Area (Scrabble) Tournament by Frank Tangredi of NY. His brief account to the national scrabble email list:

"No, I'm not tooting my horn about winning the early bird, though that felt DAMN good. But on Saturday night, I made the best anagrams steal of my life - even better than KINDLIEST + F*.

David Wiegand had RETALIATE....

I stole it with DMNT... And the word was...

TATTERDEMALION."

It's pretty unbelievable how far certain players go in playing Anagrams. The top players are so good that it's impossible for most good scrabble players to even hold onto any words for the duration of a game.

Kudos to you for introducing it to a new group of players...

Bob Gillis

*Distelfink n. A traditional Pennsylvania Dutch folk art motif of a bird or birds symbolizing good luck and happiness.

In the beginning was the word (game)...

There's nothing new under the sun, just rehash. But that doesn't mean rehash can't be breathtakingly original, and new. We'd like to think ours is. But we're also students of history, and want to know where things come from, and how they got from there to here. For a comprehensive and in-depth look at word games down through the ages and around the world, check out Steffan O'Sullivan and Graham Toal's excellent Letter-by-Letter Word Games.