Source: Radio New Zealand
Cecily Bruce (left) and Joanne Craig battle it out at the 2026 Scrabble NZ Women’s Championship. LetsPlayScrabble/screenshot
There would have been a fair Scrabble sets dusted off over the holidays, perhaps kicking off a few family feuds even, but few more serious than the first New Zealand Women’s Championship in the game.
Twenty Kiwi women vied for the title in Auckland over the weekend, which eventually went to Cicely Bruce, who only dropped a single match in the 16-round tournament.
Joanne Craig, who finished third with 13 wins, lost to Bruce in the final round – a match that decided the eventual outcome, falling behind second-placed Anderina McLean on points differential.
In 2017, Craig won the world World Senior Scrabble Championships. She also previously won the inaugural Australian women’s title.
“My granny taught me to play when I was at primary school, but I really only seriously took it up in ’93, which obviously is over 30 years now. So yes, I have been playing for a long time.”
Now based in Sydney, Craig practises using the obvious – a Collins dictionary – but also modern tools, like software that can analyse her games “to see where I went wrong”.
The tournament was streamed online.
“My neighbour said he was going to be busy watching flies crawl up the wall instead,” Craig said.
“But yes, they were surprised that some non-Scrabblers found it quite fascinating, the intensity and concentration involved. But obviously to Scrabblers it’s really interesting because there’s experienced commentators talking about the game, you can see our racks and the board, so people will be thinking, ‘Oh, what would I play?’ And yeah. Yeah, people do enjoy watching it.”
In her final round match, which effectively served as a grand final, Craig realised she had lost when Bruce played ‘jimmied’ for 82 points, putting her far into the lead.
“That was a great word.”
Craig said her top word over the weekend was a 140-point ‘snarfled’.
“You can really score with the Z and the X. I held the record in Australia for 10 years for ‘sleazier’ because I doubled the Z and it was a triple-triple, where it goes across two red squares so it’s nine times the word and you can get a really big score with it.”
She will try again next time.
“I’ll definitely be back for the next one and Scrabblers like that, you know? It’s swings and roundabouts. At lunchtime I was two games behind and I thought I’d blown all my chances, so I was very surprised to be sitting in that streaming chair at table one for the last game when it when it came down to the wire.”
And it could easily have gone either way.
“The winner of the last game was either going to be Cecil or I, but I beat her early in the tournament. She only lost that one game to me, and then of course she beat me in the final game.”
New Zealand has a strong reputation in competitive Scrabble, with Christchurch’s Nigel Richards having won not only English-language world titles, but also tournaments in French and Spanish – despite not speaking either language.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
