Wednesday night, a group of University of Alabama students will be competing in the University’s first Spanish Scrabble Championship.
The Spanish Club, run by faculty advisor Karina Vázquez and two UA graduate students, Jessica Hubickey and Toloo Riazi, will host the competition.
“The Spanish Club is an organization created to promote and enhance the Spanish language and culture among University of Alabama students,” Hubickey said. “We felt that a Spanish Scrabble Night would be a great opportunity to allow students to unite, relax and show off their Spanish vocabulary skills while playing a fun game practicing and engaging with the language.”
All UA students can compete in the championship. Those not majoring in Spanish or without any experience with the language can compete using a bilingual dictionary.
“I’ve done this in the past, and I’ve found that students get very excited while playing Spanish Scrabble,” Vázquez said. “It gives students the chance to play and search for words, have fun and learn something too. And this is the first time, at least as far as I know, that we are going to do this.”
The championship will start at 6:30 p.m. in the lobby of the Spanish House, a Living-Learning Community located on campus in the Bryce Lawn apartments.
Competitors will form teams of two and play against three other teams on a Scrabble board. Vázquez predicts there will be four or five different Spanish Scrabble boards with four teams playing at each board.
The game is played like regular Scrabble with all of the letter tiles and words in Spanish.
The regular Scrabble rules apply: teams collect points by placing Spanish words on the game board. Each letter has a different point value; the more complex the word, the more points the team earns. Each team will be given a Spanish-English dictionary, which they can use to search for a word that they can make out of the letters they have.
The championship will end when all of the teams have finished their games (when all the boards have run out of letters). Prizes will be awarded to the first, second and third highest-scoring teams out of the entire competition.
If this semester’s Scrabble Championship is successful, it will become a regular Spanish Club event.
“We usually have different activities at the Spanish Club, from celebrating a particular Hispanic festivity, like Las Posadas or El Dia de los Muertos, film series, food demonstrations,” Vázquez said. “Spanish Scrabble would become another regular event that we would have every semester.”
Vázquez encourages all competitors, regardless of their Spanish proficiency, to just relax and have fun.
“When I did it in the past, it was always very successful,” she said. “Very, very successful. The students were surprised that they remembered and knew more words than they thought they knew. That’s the most interesting thing. We know more than we think we know.”
