The Scrabble Sentence Cube

A few nights back I was at a friend's apartment and we got this silly idea that we just had to play a board game. It's funny how the mood for that strikes you so irregularly and all-encompassing. Think about it - there's rarely any time where you say to yourself 'I must play Monopoly.' But on those rare occasions when you do, the idea sticks into your head with such an intense voracity that you'd sooner chop off your fingers and make little game pieces out of 'em than accept the fact that you can't play. This was the case the other night. We were prepared to give our lives for our desire to roll dice and keep score, but unfortunately, the friend in question didn't have any board games at her apartment. We were rebels without a cause, gamers without a game, monkeys without a banana - whatever analogy you can think up. It's a terrible feeling.

Then I remembered that the trunk of my car - the contents of which haven't been thoroughly examined probably since the Reagan administration - might hold the key. On previous occasions, I've been able to locate a working kidney and three copies of the Mad Magazine that made fun of Princess Di's car crash without much of a fuss...surely this bottomless trunk of forgotten goodness would play host to a board game to quench our competitive spirits. And indeed it did, but as is usually the case when you go to the land of oil-soaked rags and donut tires for entertainment, sometimes you get a little more than you bargained for.

The Scrabble Sentence Cube game came out in the early 70s. Now I can tell you from my collecting/dealing days - the 80s might've been the true haven for the influx of the great worldwide action figure era, but the 70s...they were all about the board games. In my time buying, selling, and trading stupid 'collectible' crap, I've come across more stupid board games from that decade than I could ever begin to count. It's like there was some massive underground movement by the government to fund the creation of hundreds upon hundreds of boards games in the hopes to keep people from realizing that the time's national treasure, Larry from Three's Company, really wasn't all that funny. I grew up a little bit later, so I can only assume that the general interest of the population during the 70s was devoted solely and completely to judging Larry's jokes. When he started to slip, the government, sensing a hostile psychotic public backlash, began shilling board games to calm everyone down and keep them occupied.

By this logic, I would personally thank Larry on one hand - if he didn't let the comedy slide on a few occasions, I might never have tasted the glory that only comes from a Jaws board game. But on the other hand, if Larry would've always stayed on top of his game, I wouldn't have had the intense displeasure of trying to justify the Scrabble Sentence Cube's pitiful excuse for family entertainment.

So Larry, if you're reading this...I like you, but we've got some issues to iron out. The link to my e-mail is at the bottom of this article. Get in touch - let's come to some common ground before I sway my rankings and make Lydia the all-time best Three's Company sidebar character.


It all seemed innocent enough, but I think this game is just obsolete. It's time has passed. If this would've turned up on my trunk twenty years ago, everything would be great. Incidentally, the same could be said if I walked into my dining room and saw Debbie Harry completely nude, spread eagle on the table. The box art for this game pictures a lovely couple way overdressed just absolutely having a ball with the Sentence Cube game. Now the cynic in me said - "The only reason they're smiling is because they're well-dressed.' But I still held out hope. Maybe they were excited because they uncovered some secret treasure of happiness that can only be achieved through the use of spinoff Scrabble games.

The box, by the way, had totally deteriorated at this point. Over the years going to thrift stores and consignment shops to see what I can pump and dump on eBay, I've always marveled at how well some things kept, while other things always showed their age. For instance, a leather jacket can stay as pristine as it was the day it was ripped from a cow's ass for years, but the pages of a book become really brittle over time. Boxes of board games, however, almost always end up morphing into some weird semi-liquid form of mildew that crumbles yo the touch and stinks up a four mile radius. The only reason I'm telling you this is because it relates to my overall annoyance with the game - on the walk back from my car trunk to the apartment, the hole left in the bottom of the box from all the deterioation caused all the pieces to spill out onto the concrete below, with a few of the word blocks gleefully rolling underneath my car. So now not only was I about to play a stupid game...I was about to play a stupid game while wearing a shirt covered in car oil and general filth.

Thanks, Larry. Thanks a lot.


I originally bought this to sell on eBay, but wouldn't you know it, it's not very popular. Nobody ever really bids on it. When you consider the fact that I've sold backyard dirt, a bootleg dollar-store Barbie doll wearing a cheetah print plastic dress, and a 5" peanut with two chirping toy frogs inside each for over 20 dollars over there, it really goes a long way in explaining just how bad this game must be. Even those impulse buyin' freaks on eBay avoid it - and these are people who'll buy your clipped toenails if you're offering 'actual' shipping costs.

What you get: Several wooden 'word cubes', hourglass timer, rolling cup, and scorepad. Father Time hasn't been too kind to the Sands of Time, as the hourglass filling is stuck to the sides by sheer virtue of spite. Because of this, we had to use a microwave as a timer. If Larry was around for all this I'd make him sit next to it - radiation poisoning seems like a fitting payback for all this crap we were going through. If you think I'm overstating things, remember this: we didn't just waste a night playing this - we wasted Saturday night. There's no better reminder that you don't have a good, working social life than spending Saturday night playing a mildew-encrusted board game from 1972.


The game works like this: a player rolls the cubes and sets the timer. Then he has a limited amount of time to try to form as many coherent sentences using the word cubes as they rolled out. The goal is to make the longest sentences you can and to use as many of the blocks as you can before time runs out. Unfortunately, very little testing or thought went into Scrabble's choosing of which words would appear on the cubes. If you want to make sentences, you're going to really have to cut corners. If there's 20 cubes in this game, 17 of them contain verbs on each of the six sides. The scoring procedure is also a tad mysterious, as even the crappiest of rolls can leave you with 450 power points.

I'm not exaggerating - take a look. This is a legit roll, I didn't doll things up for the sake of argument. Here was the best I could come up with:


My three favorites:

"The boy can smell with his big girl."
"He can fly and love."
"Girl clean but dirty."

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure the Scrabble Sentence Cube game serves as a universal template for anyone writing a book based on the teachings of Tao, or anyone writing a book who was raised by a pack of wild rabbits. Either way, the game night was a huge disappointment. I'm not sure why I'm even reviewing this, because it's not like any of you are going to create a time machine just so you can go check out the entertainment values of 1970s board games. But, if one of you do, this is one you can skip.

Oh, Larry...if only you were funnier.


- Matt