It was a tempest in a teapot the likes of which I haven’t seen, well, in a long time. The whole issue was something fairly trivial, in the grand scheme of things, but people were going crazy at the idea that the classic word game Scrabble might be changing the official rules to allow proper nouns. Fortunately for word nerds everywhere, that’s not the case. Traditional Scrabble is going nowhere.
It’s a simple case of mistaken identity: Scrabble isn’t changing, Mattel is just releasing a new game called Scrabble Trickster in the UK. The game is a word game like Scrabble, just with a more pop culture bent; thus, proper nouns were added to the game. The original Scrabble, marketed by Hasbro in the US and Mattel everywhere else, will remain the same. Scrabble Trickster is joining a whole line of other games in the Scrabble family, including: Scrabble Slam (a card game), lots of Scrabble video games and iPhone apps, and the soon-to-be-released Scrabble Flash (an electronic version of the game with tiles that click together).
Generally I play Scrabble once a week with some friends, and given that we play a lot and don’t have much time to play, we’ve changed the rules a little bit. We use 9 tiles rather than 7, and a simple up-or-down vote determines whether or not a word is acceptable on our Scrabble board. It makes the game quicker and a little more interesting (though I still dominate the games). If you’re having fun, use your own rules. Don’t be married to Official Scrabble’s laws and regulations; you control your Scrabble board!
Image: Patrick Easters
Tags: Mattel, Hasbro, Scrabble, Scrabble rules changing in the UK, pop culture version of Scrabble, new version of Scrabble, Scrabble rule change, dumbing down Scrabble, controversies, games, classic games, word games, Scrabble Trickster
