I've been playing Words With Friends, and it's helping me further shape my ideas of what I want Scrabble to be.<\/p>\n
It eventually occurred to me that I don't like the bonus squares. Their presence leads me to focus on placing high-scoring letters on letter-bonus squares, and any words at all on word-bonus squares. When a short and boring word hits a triple word score square, it can score far more points than a longer and\/or more interesting word.<\/p>\n
So I started thinking about getting a physical Scrabble board on which I can just ignore the bonus squares.<\/p>\n
And then I realized\/remembered that I actually don't like Scrabble's letter-based scoring system much even without the bonus squares.<\/p>\n
For me, what makes come-up-with-words games fun is coming up with unusual and neat words. And such words don't necessarily contain less-common letters.<\/p>\n
So in my ideal Scrabble scoring system, the plays that would score highest would be (approximately) the least-common words that at least two of the players in the game are familiar with. (And probably longer words would score higher than shorter ones, all else being equal.)<\/p>\n
For example, I just played WRIT in a Words With Friends game. It scored 9 points, and that was only because the R was on a triple letter score; otherwise it would've been 7. WRIT is a neat word, and one that doesn't come up very often in modern usage unless you're a lawyer, but it's common enough that I imagine most people have heard it. In my ideal system, that should score a lot more than an ordinary word like, say, MEN played on a triple word score (which scores 21 points).<\/p>\n
Then again, I suppose in my really ideal scoring system, there's no actual scoring at all per se (so maybe what I really need is a Syzygy<\/a> or Bananagrams set: no board, just tiles without numbers). Instead, you just get whuffie from the other players for coming up with cool words.<\/p>\n Or quasi-words. I've written before about my philosophy of Scrabble<\/a> and my proposed house rules<\/a>, and I've talked about some variants<\/a> I like, as well as a fun game of plausible-fantasy-words quasi-Scrabble<\/a>, but I haven't focused much on one specific option for what counts as a word: allowing anything that all players agree is a word, including foreign words and proper nouns. For example, I suspect most of my friends know the meaning of the word “gracias,” even though it's not an English word; why not allow it in Scrabble?<\/p>\n There are certain standard\/default parameters for most American word games and puzzles: no foreign words, no proper nouns, no acronyms, etc. And in most contexts I'm pretty happy with those rules. But I think it would be fun to relax them, at least sometimes, for Scrabble.<\/p>\n While I'm here, I may as well include links to other past Scrabble-related entries: I pledge thee my trogs<\/a>, The Big Snit<\/a>, Vardibidian on MFQ<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve been playing Words With Friends, and it’s helping me further shape my ideas of what I want Scrabble to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-language"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}