Scrabble reformers: Donald Sauter and the Dover Scrabble Club

In contrast with the Scrabble reform proposed by Peter Roizen (see the previous post on WildWords), Donald Sauter's complaints are more of the "95 Theses" number. When he says he wants to fix Scrabble, some of the complaints he lists are:

• Bluffing was never a part of the original game of Scrabble and was only introduced in 1976.
  
• The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has been anointed as the definitive word list, in spite of the fact that it contains lots and lots of bogus words (no longer printed in any dictionary), suggesting that about 5% of all OSPD words may be in this category.
  
• As a corollary, conventional Scrabble encourages lots of little words to be played.
  
• The standard Scrabble tile distribution gets boring after a while.

His solution?

Scrabble II: Amongst the new rules:

• Play with 8 tiles on each player's rack instead of 7 and allow bonuses for 6-, 7-, and 8-tile plays.
  
• Use a real dictionary (but toss some of its more made-up, iffy, or downright ridiculous words).
  
• Allow words to stretch beyond the borders of the standard 15-by-15 board. (The extended board is such a cool idea!)
  
• Forbid plays where only a single two-letter word is formed.
  
• Mix three tile sets together and select a new, random tile distribution for each game.

Here are the full rules of Scrabble II, and a far more detailed description of the motivations behind and playing of Scrabble II. The latter is particularly fun to read because it is so spirited and analytical, and as a bonus it contains what amounts to a manifesto on two-letter words.

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There are now tiny little ad hoc Bananagrams tournaments sprouting up in the U.S. without any organization or permanence to them. This is probably how Scrabble tournaments started up. Whether this will develop into anything like nationwide tournaments is yet to be seen. If it does, I would hope that some of the mistakes of the Scrabble tournament scene could be avoided. In particular, I would like to see competition divided into different groupings: one for the word-memorizers and one for the more casual player. Ideally, a newcomer to Bananagrams should be able to learn the rules of the game and start competing on the first day.

As Stefan Fatsis says in Word Freak (his book on the tournament Scrabble subculture), "Recruiting new players is Scrabble's toughest task." In addition to helping distinguish it from being just a "speed Scrabble" tournament, eliminating the requirement to learn a bunch of arbitrary letter sequences would make a Bananagrams tournament more inclusive and open and fun.

Scrabble reformers: W*W*S

Last month, the Scrabble world was briefly rocked by news reports saying that a new version of Scrabble would allow proper nouns to be used as words. (It doesn't take much to rock the Scrabble world.) These stories turned out to be false. Actually Mattel is just introducing yet another of its many tangential spin-offs of Scrabble - in this case, a game called "Scrabble Trickster". But the resulting outrage serves as a good illustration of how passionate people are about defending the standard rules of Scrabble.

And then there are those on the other side of the spectrum, who believe that something is wrong with Scrabble and that it needs to be fixed. And they have come up with some delightfully crazy solutions.

Discontent with the word-memorization and short words that optimum Scrabble strategy requires, Peter Roizen came up with two small changes that totally transmogrify Scrabble into something else. First, he got rid of the blank tiles (which can stand for only one letter) and added in twelve wildcard tiles (which can represent long strings of letters). So, for example, the word

TRANSMOGRIFY

could be spelled

TR*M*Y

Unlike blank tiles, when building off of the wildcard tiles in the other direction, they can again stand for any sequence of letters desired by the player. And the second change he made was to add wildcard squares to the board. When placing a word that includes one of the wildcard squares, any tile can be placed on the wildcard square, turned over so it looks like a blank, but still functions like a wildcard.

An extra twist is that the player placing the tiles does not have to immediately reveal what the wildcards stand for. The opponents then have to decide whether to challenge the word, based on whether they believe the first player really knows a word that matches the wildcard pattern. Therefore, bluffing and pattern matching play a large role in this game.

The main effect of the wildcards is to break the game open, so rather than being dominated by short words, the board becomes covered in long words (albeit, long words that tend to be represented by 5 or 6 letters and some wildcards).

The web site for the game is filled with amusing discussion and digressions on Scrabble and WildWords.

There is also a free computer version of WildWords for computers that run on the Windows operating system. It allows people on different computers to play together.

The obvious question now is, what effect would including either blanks or wildcard tiles have on Bananagrams play? My guess is that both tiles would just make Bananagrams go faster. But it might be interesting to mix them in to balance other variations that tend to slow down the game to get a game with different strategy while maintaining Bananagrams speed.