Scrabble Rule Change

Proper nouns allowed

Well, this is earthshaking news. Mattel has changed the rules of the board game, Scrabble.

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Source: "Proper nouns come into play in Scrabble rule change", BBC News, April 6, 2010.

Later in the article, Mattel (a Mattel spokesperson, surely) says that there will be no rules about right or wrong spellings of proper nouns. It's hard for me to understand how that will work, but I guess it will be all right for those who want to play by those rules.

Keely and I have already decided that we will continue to play by the traditional rules. In our house, that means that no proper nouns at all are allowed.

The appearance of Scrabble in world news gives me an excuse to share our Easter afternoon Scrabble game. It was a good one! At the end of the game, we both had three letters left, and the score was 680 (Keely) to 756 (me). In a stunning moment of pure genius, Keely saw that she could play all three of her letters (E, I, and W) in the following location on the board.

The blank letter is a T. Do you see the place where Keely played? Click here to see the word that earned her 102 points and moved her to the lead, 782 to 770. (In anatomy, an iter is a passage or canal, particularly in the brain.)

I played my last three letters and got another 27 points, making the final score 809 to 782 in my favor. Looking at the completed game now, I don't even remember the places where I played. I won, but it hardly seemed a victory after Keely's spectacular coup.

That's how Scrabble is supposed to be played. Proper nouns would spoil everything!

UPDATE: It turns out that the U.S. version of Scrabble, owned by Hasbro, has not changed its rules. See the comments below for a link.

Saturday Night Scrabble

New and old words

Keely and Taurus came for pizza on Saturday night, and after supper, Keely, Isaac, and I played a game of Scrabble on Keely's extra-large board.

Isaac played "LEET" and said it was an alternative internet language. It wasn't in the dictionaries we were using, and I had never heard of it. With some indignation and a bit of scorn, Isaac produced an Urban Dictionary definition of leet on his laptop and educated me.

Today, I looked up leet at www.dict.org and learned that it has some traditional meanings as well. It's another name for a pollack (a type of fish), and it also has some legal meanings.  If you don't see LEET on the gameboard, that's because someone added an F and made it "FLEET."

"POO" was also one of Isaac's words. Isaac thought I was picking on him when I checked to see if poo was in the dictionary. He shouldn't have worried. According to the yellowed pages of a 1961 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary that we had on the table, poo is a verb of Scottish derivation that means "pull".

I played "PENT" and the kids questioned it because it's usually heard as "pent-up". Of course, it's in the dictionary. Pent is an old variant of "penned", meaning "confined or caged". Really, would I try to invent a word, children? (Don't answer that question, please. It's strictly rhetorical.)

We didn't reach many of the quadruple word squares at the edges of the board. I think it was because Keely was hoarding all the good letters. (Just kidding, Keely!). Below, her letters at one point in the game -- nary a vowel amongst them. If she had known about the Scrabble Solver, she would have been wanting to use it!

Scrabble to the Death

Marathon match

Keely brought her fancy Scrabble board yesterday when she and Taurus came out for Easter dinner. After the dishes were done, she challenged me to a Scrabble "duel to the death", and I accepted.

Each square on Keely's board has a ridge around its boundaries so the letters don't slide around.  It has twice as many letter pieces as Classic Scrabble does and twice as many squares on the board.  The squares on the corners are quadruple words, and there are also some quadruple letter squares.

Our duel lasted three hours.  Lengthy dictionary searches were conducted (mostly by me, because I wasn't feeling very sharp), and there was an extended "7th inning stretch" while I found the popcorn and the air popper.

We managed to play all the letters, and the final score was 711-707 in my favor. My brain was dead afterwards so Keely did duel me to the death.

It wasn't a decisive victory. I wouldn't have won if Keely hadn't showed me a place to play where I got 19 points, instead of the 6 points I was getting ready to play. But on the other hand, she played a proper noun (Zend), and I didn't catch it until it was too late to call it. I predict a rematch in the future.

New Year's Eve

I spent a safe and sober New Year's Eve with our daughter Keely and her friend Taurus. Here we are at Shoneys, enjoying the breakfast buffet, after an exciting game of Scrabble.