Jack.is » Angry » Scrabblerules
6 April, 2010
A BBC article today seems to have caused initial confusion over planned changes to Scrabble. The article says that Mattel plans to produce a "new version" of Scrabble in July, while "not … doing away with the old rules altogether", which makes it sound like they'll change the official rules of Scrabble to allow proper nouns, which understandably gets some players upset. Fortunately, as covered here, it seems that Mattel actually intends to release a separate Scrabble game called Scrabble Trickster, which, besides proper nouns, will include various other underhanded moves you wish you could make when you realize you suck at Scrabble and don't want to play "for real" anymore. Now that we've cleared that up, we don't need to worry anymore. We need no longer live in fear of the imminent corruption of a perfectly good game, right? Maybe not.
I may come off as a fearmongering purist, but at this time I don't have high hopes for the results of this change. If the Mattel spokeswoman quoted in the BBC article got her information from a reliable source in the company, Scrabble Trickster seems marketed at least partially toward "younger fans and families". To me, this means "casual players"; i.e., in plainer English, "people too impatient or stupid to play real Scrabble". I see nothing wrong with that, as long as I don't have to deal with idiots who try to use Trickster rules when I go to play Scrabble -- but I believe we'll end up with exactly that problem. If Mattel succeeds in marketing Trickster to "younger fans", we may well have a great deal of kids learning Scrabble with fucked-up rules. The lucky ones will have parents who learned the real game and will stop them taking this nonsense seriously, but I can only imagine an overall corruption of the popular idea of how we play Scrabble. If this doesn't seem like your problem right now, just remember that when these young, misled Scrabblers grow up and extend their play outside of Family Fun Friday Game Nights, you'll have to deal with it. You may find few arguments more stubborn than "But I always did it this way!"
Eager for the apocalyse? No need to wait. Even before "younger fans" arrive en masse to overthrow Real Scrabble©®™ we'll have a more immediate problem: New players and current casual players. You might think that we can call all players of a board game "casual players", for lack of any other category, but I differentiate here between people who care about the technique, strategy, and wordplay, and people who want to break out the stiff, mint-condition board every once in a while to build funny, dirty words, think that bigger means better, and generally use it more as a social hub than a pursuit of skill. Now, these casual players will get hold of Trickster and learn these exciting, new, freeing rules. When they have all the right letters to spell their favorite city no one else has ever heard of, they can. When they wish they could change tiles with another player instead of the pool, they can. Ever peeked at your opponent's tiles and seen that they have the last U for your Q? Now you can have it. Or however they plan to do that. Anyway, they'll learn these new rules -- or lack thereof -- and the next time you try to play Scrabble with some Joe who "knows how but doesn't play much", you may well find yourself having to tell him he can't do that every few turns.
We have one clear solution: Education. Only by writing and distributing melodramatic pamphlets outlining the horrors and hazards of this newfangled corruption of a perfectly good game can we avert recreational disaster. Only YOU can prevent idiocy. Remember when you would play checkers as a kid, and your opponent would make up dumbass moves just when you thought you would win? Like the "cyclone", which involved sweeping all your pieces off the board in a circular motion? Or a redefinition of the jumping rules? And then when you tried to argue they would insist they had won and then it devolved into name-calling and then the first guy to play the rubber-glue card won? Didn't that piss you off? You may have to endure such hopeless unfairness yet again if you don't work against this.
Get real. Play real. Refuse to use loser rules. Real Scrabble 4 lyf.