Scrabble is arranging a random selection of tiles into combinations in such a way that score is maximized.
The tiles could have hexadecimal numbers on them and could be played against a randomly generated dictionary of scored combinations. Much like you can play chess with dragons figurines instead of castles or storm troopers instead pawns.
It was as much to do with words as chess has to do with war in the middle ages.
This is an intriguing assertion. The words of a natural language are far from randomly generated. While I can invent new words like 'wobblery' or 'fandogonkified' they still follow patterns familiar from other words.
If I understand the Chomsky idea correctly, we are born with structures in our brain ready to accept a new language. A human might have a hard time memorizing a dictionary of randomly generated words in hexidecimal -- he or she would have to resort to mnemonic techniques (peg lists, memory palace, etc) to memorize that dictionary but it could be done. Further, it could be done by any human who was dedicated to the task.
Whereas the system you describe involves brute force, much like the Deep Blue approach to winning chess. And it's been shown that a group of people collaborating together can defeat computers at chess! I think a lot of interesting research could be done here (if it hasn't already) and it would not surprise me if your assertion could be proven wrong (but I generally agree with it).
I mean it's literally one language against another one. You can call it 'meaning' all you like, but 'meaning' is representative. You call it 'understand' but to this guy memorizing the entire dictionary in order might mean 'understand'.
You might say you need to have felt 'being angry' in order to know what 'angry means' and to determine this as understanding the meaning of the word is ridiculous because it goes both ways. People make their owns meanings up, the only reason we agree is because we exist in relatively the same space time (with respect to the size and age of the universe) and information only varies so much at the distributed rate it tends to vary across minds, people most people are similar in how their minds function and construct pattern relations.
Honestly, some Chess players don't even make the horsey noise when they move the knights.