Kick-start Your Brain with Scribble

Productivity Sauce

Sometimes your brain needs a gentle push to get into gear. For some a good cup of coffee does the trick, while others prefer to use a good word game to kick-start their gray cells. If you belong to the latter category, you might appreciate Scribble, a command line-based version of the popular Scrabble game. Scribble is available in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu. To install Scribble on the latter, run the sudo apt-get install scribble command and you are good to go. Run the scribble command to start a new game. You can also specify a difficulty level from 1 (easiest) to 9 (most difficult), for example: scribble 5 or scribble 7.

If you are familiar with Scrabble, you won't have problems figuring out how to play Scribble. Your task is to use the letters at your disposal to construct a word and place it on the board. To do the latter, you have to specify coordinates and direction first, for example 57a (a stands for "across") or 9Bd (d stands for "down"). Similar to the original game, Scribble's board sports bonus squares that double and triple letter and word scores. You can view a full list of letter values and bonus scores at any time using the info command. The pass command allows you to skip your turn, while the quit command quits Scribble. To view a list of all available commands, type help and press Enter.

Although Scribble doesn't sport advanced features like multi-player or network games, and it lacks a graphical interface, it's still a fun game to play. So if you need a quick brain exercise, give Scribble a try.

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