Scrabble rule change allows use of 'OK'
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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)
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).
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."
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-makes-nigel-richar...
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.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-qi-and-za-changed-s...
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.
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.
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
Even if such a move scores 20-ish points less than your points-wise optimal move, it may be the better choice.
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.
[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.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Mosher_Butts
I'd love to hear more about how your Grandmother who must have been born no later than 1905 played Scrabble in college with Alfred Butts.
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/01/nyregion/neighborhood-rep...
> He collected accounts from some original players, like members of the Jackson Heights Woman's College Club.
Most of the hardcore Scrabble people I've known would object to that. ("This isn't 'Nam, there are rules.")
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.
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.
> No, this is against the rules.
It wasn't, but even if it was, that's only the official rules. We can choose to play by different rules.
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.
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.
If so, I could see UV being added.
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.
Ko is in for being a (loan)word in its own right, not as the two-letter abbreviation for "knockout". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ko_fight
Link: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Scrabble/Two_Letter_Words
Found the Emacs user.
:)
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!
We still have ye.
Perhaps more importantly, I don't think singular "they" would be considered proper in formal writing.
> The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.
from https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
There's not a man I meet but doth salute me/ As if I were their well-acquainted friend.
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.
So, the “their” could change to any of “hir”, “mer”, “zir”, or “zes”, depending on which “ze” pattern was used.
I suspect it depends on dialect. "their" just sounds more informal to me, "his"/"her" sounds slightly more formal.
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.
It does sound wrong for some uses of he/she.
“I’m worried about my kid at summer camp”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure they are having a great time”
Sounds very natural to my west coast ears.
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"
There's also youse, seen in Irish english. (at least in the Dublin dialect, can't say I've heard it much in the north)
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.