I've posted this before but in my family we play serious Scrabble but with house rules that improve the game.
Rule 1: On your turn, but before playing your word, any letter in your hand may be swapped with any letter on the board, as long as the swap makes a valid word (some people already do this with blanks, we do it with any letter). Swap one letter at a time, as many times as you like. No points are scored for swaps, just for playing your word.
Rule 2: Dictionary may be consulted at any time to look up a specific word - however you cannot "leaf" or browse through it. Dictionary priority goes to whoever's turn it is.
The net result of this variation is that
a) the board remains MUCH more open the whole game - there are many more places to play, and the words played are more likely to be bingos or longer words, which in turn open the baord up even more. Often under official rules you get three or four letter words that just close down the future play possibilities.
b) high-point letters which usually are "luck of the draw" like Q and Z, now become skillful, since they will be reused by many players throughout the game
c) turns can take 5-10 minutes at a time :)
Source: my grandmother, who played these rules with the inventor of Scrabble back in college, before he had sold the game for mass distribution (they changed his rules to simplify them)
I think that’s a sign of suboptimal play. The goal isn’t to score as many points as possible, it’s to score more points than your opponent. Opening up a line towards a triple-later or even triple-word square only is worth it if your word scores really high.
Also, there often are high-scoring moves that ‘weave’ new words inside the existing grid. An extreme example is adding the o’s in an existing grid of x’es:
xxxxx
ooxoox
xxxxx
x
(That’s one reason competitive players have to know the full sets of two- and three letter words)
Even if such a move scores 20-ish points less than your points-wise optimal move, it may be the better choice.
Unless you're playing competitively, the goal is also to have fun, and games are much more enjoyable when there's room to expand and you're not forced to place sub-optimal words.
The goal in Scrabble is to crush your friends and hear their lamentations as I get double words scores while blocking their potential expansions. It is not this fun thing that people keep talking about.
"Bricking" the board by packing in words next to each other to add to your score commonly happens under our variation - although non-contiguous plays are rare.
And I will still avoid opening up a triple-word square if I can - or cover up an open triple-word just to prevent my opponent from using it. Although it's worth pointing out that under our variation, triple-words - while still very valuable - aren't the end of the world since we'll be playing bingos all over the board the whole game, there's really no need to fight for pink squares.
All three of your rules (swap blanks, swap single letters, and allow consulting the dictionary) are listed as official alternative rules in my Scrabble rule book[0]. We've always allowed use of the dictionary (as a new immigrant from northern Europe, it was one of the ways my grandpa learned English), but we just talked about adopting the letter-swapping rules the next time we play.
[0] I have my late grandpa's "deluxe turntable" version from the 1970s, before it was owned by Hasbro, and my folks have an almost identical one from the 1980s (Hasbro-branded). I believe both rule books have these alternative/house rules.
On your Rule 1, do I understand that you can swap any number of letters on your turn before playing your word but with every 1-letter swap, the words need to remain valid? It's not good enough if you need to swap multiple letters before getting to a different valid word?
Correct. The goal is not really to change the words on the board, but rather to get better letters into your hand.
Think of it as "I would have a full word if only I could get [X letter]." You see [X letter] on the board, and you want it. You might have to do a chain of one-letter-at-a-time swaps though to get it. And each swap has to make a new valid word. But once you get it, you can play your bingo.
How are Q and Z getting reused so much? There can't be that many times they can be replaced with another letter can there?
Also, after I saw how many "words" are in the Scrabble dictionary I realized that Scrabble was not a vocabulary/spelling competition like I thought when I first played. Some of those "words" are a joke, a few are mentioned in the article (eeew being one example).
"For living-room players, Scrabble is about language, a test of vocabularies. For world-class players, it’s about cold memorization and mathematical probabilities. Think of the dictionary not as a compendium of the beauty and complexity of the English language, but rather as a giant rulebook. Words exist merely as valid strings with which to score points.
A Scrabble board after two top players are finished playing on it might look, to the uninitiated, as though they had played in Martian. Here’s a taste: In a single game in last year’s Nationals, Richards played the following words: zarf (a metal holder for a coffee cup), waddy (to strike with a thick club), hulloed (to hallo, to shout), sajous (a capuchin, a monkey), qi (the vital force in Chinese thought), flyboats (a small, fast boat), trigo (wheat) and threaper (one that threaps, disputes).
Top players tend not to be novelists or poets, but more often computer programmers or mathematicians."
Sidenote on replacing Q and Z: "Qi" and "Za" are common and useful ways of using q/z which also readily support replacement. In my experience, this is the first "rules change" that one encounters when going from casual Scrabble/Bananagrams/etc to something slightly more competitive. Enabling or disabling these two two-letter words in particular has a huge impact on the game.
The two- and three-letter words you can make like AX, QI, XI, ZA, QAT, ZOO, and ZOA get used quite a bit. All of these words can have their high-point letter swapped out for something else to free it up again. Sometimes the Q, X, or Z does get locked up on the board for the rest of the game. But if it's not, it's often worth your effort to try to get it back into your hand and use it again.
We definitely still keep track of not only what letters are left in the bag, but what letters are in others' hands - since you can watch them pick them up from the board.
> Source: my grandmother, who played these rules with the inventor of Scrabble back in college, before he had sold the game for mass distribution (they changed his rules to simplify them)
The inventor of Scrabble graduated college in 1924. He conceived of and developed the game in the late 30s while he was working full-time as an architect. He didn't start producing the games 'til after WW II, in 1948. He sold the rights in 1952.
This promises to causes a big shakeup of the Scrabble meta, two letter words are the lifeblood of high-level scrabble play and `K` is a juicy, juicy letter (points wise) to have an extra 2 letter word for.
This is huge. Two letter words are very important in Scrabble for exploiting double use of double/triple letter/word scores. K is a medium-scoring letter so being able to have a two-letter word with it in makes quite a difference.
playing a lot of scrabble -- our regular play includes a list of two-letter words on paper, in pencil, nearby to settle disputes (not visible during play). The arguments get heated ! .. (our list is smaller than the official list of two letter words, based on mutual agreement of real-world use). Personal opinion is that the official list is already too broad, and makes the play "muddy." Dictionary exploration is nerd-fun! We use a 1950s Webster's Unabridged English (which webster? have to check) and a 1980s Oxford American-English; both have their quirks ! happy SCRABBLE™
It used to be 102 two letter words that were allowed, memorising all of them was not difficult, you would just know them if you played fairly regularly. Occasional players (who you probably wouldn't be playing with if you played regularly) would not know the 102 two letter words. Slightly more to remember than the alphabet, but anything wrong on the board would be easy to spot as wrong, no risk in making a challenge.
As for dictionaries, mobile phones and apps changed everything. However, before these 'advances' the dictionary to use was the correct Scrabble one.
What I liked about the proper Scrabble dictionary was that none of the words were explained. So you could play words beyond your normal level of spoken English without knowing what they meant, but you would know they were in the proper Scrabble dictionary. So you could have 'ax' and not know what it meant or extend it on the next go to 'axon' with no idea what that meant. You did know from previous games that this was legit and that was all that mattered.
To people not in the game this dictionary seemed absurd. The language had morphed into code. A code that you had to know if you were ever to have a chance of using complete 7 letter 'laydowns' several times in a game and do those cool two letter joins to make such things possible.
I doubt that actual hardcore Scrabble players would care, any more than a hardcore chess player would mind if you kept referring to an index card with a diagram to remind you which way the horsey moves. Of course, they would care about you having access to the entire dictionary, just as a serious chess player would object to you having a collection of chess opening or endgame reference books to hand.
At a beginner level, it's more fun when no one knows the word list perfectly, and you shouldn't allow it.
At a slightly-above-beginner level, say where one player knows the two-letter words and others do not, knowing the two-letter words is such a huge advantage that it's a sensible house rule to level the playing field a little, and likely make it more fun for both.
> the regular players have a list of two-letter words on paper, in pencil, at hand.
No, this is against the rules. You know what we call a list of words? A dictionary. You aren't allowed to have those open until a word gets challenged. A decade ago I had all the two letter words in the Scrabble dictionary memorized, I doubt I'd still be able to spit them all out.
I'm pretty sure he edited that comment without noting it, the current text doesn't match what I quoted. I do think I misread his intent, but I don't think he originally said that it was just for resolving disputes or specified that it wasn't visible during play. You can see other comments reacting in line with my original interpretation, too.
KO is already a valid word in international (English language) tournament play.
Personally, I am sad about this. Serious scrabble play is largely about rack management - i.e. trying to get a set of tiles that you can play all at once for a 50 point bonus (bingo). That means dumping tiles that make it harder to score a bingo (duplicates, difficult letters) while
taking into consideration the likelihood of drawing better tiles given what's been played and what letters your opponent is dumping (signalling what's in their rack). Most turns are about maximizing the points from non-bingos while putting together a good rack, and that frequently means playing words parallel to what's already on the board to double-up on a premium tile.
The 2006 OSPD addition of "ZA" and "QI" really changed the game, and not in a good way. Q-sticks (sticking your opponent with an unplayable Q) were a staple of end-game play, especially but are now basically obsolete.
OK rankles especially as an initialism. There will be (very nerdy) riots if a 2 letter 'V' word is ever added.
The general rule is, if the letters are pronounced phoenetically together as a word, it counts. That's why Scuba and Laser are in. It's the difference between AWOL (in) and MIA (not).
OK was never accepted before because it's not said as "ock". UV isn't pronounced "uhv" so should also be excluded. I guess now the distinguishing feature between those cases is that UV is an initialism while OK isn't. I can't think of any other example like OK, a word that is not an initialism and is said by naming each letter rather than pronouncing them phonetically.
I like the idea of "ze" (gender-neutral pronoun), but this is the first I've come across it. Hopefully it'll catch on as IMHO it's a big improvement over alternatives like "they".
While on the topic of "missing" words, when will our language finally get something reasonable for "you (plural)"?? Extant "y'all" (southern) and "yous" (NJ) are not cutting it!
Why is it a big improvement over 'they'? Singular they has become popular naturally, whereas 'ze' has existed for years without anyone naturally using it(except for trolls on the internet).
If it is good enough for Austin, Byron, and Chesterfield, not to mention Shakespeare, then it is good enough for me.
The catch is that it sounds best when there's no specific antecedent: "Every user of the workshop must be responsible for their own safety."
It sounds odder when it is deliberately used to avoid (mis)gendering a specific individual: "Pat does not discuss their* gender." I think this is the niche that 'ze' is supposed to fill.
I looked at some older examples of singular-they and they almost exclusively refer to an unknown or unspecified person ("Everyone loves their mother"). Using it for a specified person seems to be fairly new: Time Magazine had a piece describing how their (in this sense) was the 2015 word of the year.
I've heard of 'ze' as a gender-neutral pronoun, but I've never really seen it used. How would you substitute 'ze' in that sentence: "Pat does not discuss their gender"?
“Ze” (like “they”) is a subject pronoun, it has been suggested with various object pronouns (like “them”), possessive determiners (like “their”) and possessive pronouns (like “theirs”), including at least these patterns: ze/hir/hir/hirs, ze/mer/zer/zers, ze/zir/zir/zirs; ze/zem/zes/zes.
So, the “their” could change to any of “hir”, “mer”, “zir”, or “zes”, depending on which “ze” pattern was used.
The accord with the verb is still as if it's a plural pronoun. Just like with "you" which technically also used to be plural, doesn't take the old singular second person forms: "you have" not "you hast"
I grew up in the South, and I never encountered the use of "y'all" in a singular context (I'm 48). I'm not sure where that idea started.
Edit: I should instead say I never encountered it among actual locals using the word in normal speech. Later on, the plural was sometimes used jokingly after the idea that "y'all" was plural had taken hold in popular, non-Southern culture.
Yeah, definitely see that (mainly from a Donegal speaker), but I think it's more an indeterminate number. "How're ye getting on" is pretty common in verbal and informal written forms, directly to one person.
You'd think Scrabble would want to stay neutral with politically charged words like this so as not to offend any potential customers and instead ultimately gain more purchases and fewer boycotts. Especially a word like ze which would not exist if we parents had been doing our jobs correctly.
I’ve got to imagine that the sort of people who would be sufficiently offended by the inclusion of a novel pronoun to _refuse to play a board game_ are not common enough for, er, whoever’s in charge of scrabble to worry about.
Rule 1: On your turn, but before playing your word, any letter in your hand may be swapped with any letter on the board, as long as the swap makes a valid word (some people already do this with blanks, we do it with any letter). Swap one letter at a time, as many times as you like. No points are scored for swaps, just for playing your word.
Rule 2: Dictionary may be consulted at any time to look up a specific word - however you cannot "leaf" or browse through it. Dictionary priority goes to whoever's turn it is.
The net result of this variation is that
a) the board remains MUCH more open the whole game - there are many more places to play, and the words played are more likely to be bingos or longer words, which in turn open the baord up even more. Often under official rules you get three or four letter words that just close down the future play possibilities.
b) high-point letters which usually are "luck of the draw" like Q and Z, now become skillful, since they will be reused by many players throughout the game
c) turns can take 5-10 minutes at a time :)
Source: my grandmother, who played these rules with the inventor of Scrabble back in college, before he had sold the game for mass distribution (they changed his rules to simplify them)