Scrabbletopia

Question: All the gods who created writing sit down for a Scrabble match. Who do you think would win?

Scrabble seems like an awesomely inadequate game for these dudes and ladies. We're talking about Thoth, Itzamna, Nisaba, Seshat, Odin, Cang Jie, Legba, Hermes, Sarasvati, Ogma, Fu Xi and others of their fantastical, unimaginably brainy or crafty ilk. These are not people who are going to be putting down five- or even fifteen-letter words on little cubes with a single language's pitiful modern alphabet on them.

If you re-imagined Scrabble as something that incorporated all letters, languages and lexicons that had ever existed simultaneously, and that had a multi-level board that probably has more dimensions than humans can conceive of that might intersect for wordplay, and that involved other symbols and mathematics that only gods would even be able to comprehend in terms of language, and that had unimaginably complex rules governing what wordplay even means to beings at this level, and allowed the creation of new language and fresh linguistics on the spot... then that sounds more like the game these guys might be playing. Just designing such a game would probably entertain some of them for quite a while, and its rules and play would be ever-changing, just like languages themselves. My brain can't wrap around all the things it would need to be, but I'm pretty sure it would be awesome.

I'm not actually sure how you'd "win" such a game, and I have a pretty neat vision of all the language gods sort of being in a constant process of playing it, coming by to take their turn whenever they come up with a particularly neat move or have a minute away from their other duties, together combining to create something insanely complex that doesn't have a real "winning" condition. I think you'd pretty much have to have Ultimate Intelligence to be able to compete with the real heavy hitters at this level, which narrows the field down considerably. My money's probably on Thoth or maybe Fu Xi; Odin might be a dark horse third option, especially if he's cheating, and I think Sarasvati's probably right up there breathing down the other gods' necks.

Incomprehensible entertainment of the gods is one of our secret hobbies, and John especially is prone to cannibalizing six or seven games together to create insane board games of the gods to subject players to during the course of Scion games, as in one story that required Geoff's band to try to win against Isis in a massively complicated and multilayered board game that Ptah and Thoth had originally invented to play against one another. Trying to come up with what this word battle of the gods looks like sounds like a totally fun project, even if anything we could come up with would be incredibly simple and nowhere close to what the reality of Ultimate Intelligence linguists would actually be doing, and if you have players who enjoy word games or off-the-wall challenges once in a while, it might be a really cool story for them to suddenly find themselves in the middle of a divine wordoff.

(They never did learn all the rules, or even most of them... but luckily for them, neither did Isis.)