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Scrabble To Allow Proper Nouns
Hogwash McFly writes "The rules of the popular word game Scrabble are soon to allow proper nouns. Mattel, the maker of the game, hopes the changes made for a new edition, released this July, will 'add a new dimension' to Scrabble and 'introduce an element of popular culture into the game.' With this rule change, the company hopes to target younger fans and families, although they will continue to sell the traditional version where 'Beyonce' and 'Facebook' are not permitted words." Nobody is listening to my suggestion to penalize by one tile any player who has memorized every two-letter English word.
Scrabble, now for stupid people!
A good house rule we use is you must be able to define and/or use the word in a sentence. If we then look the questionable word up, even if it is in the dictionary, it may be denied if your definition was way off.
actually you want to memorize 6 letter stems, then go to five and 4 letter stems if you want to be competitive. bingos win games, and even the best players have trouble locking a board up against equally skilled players. but strategy will almost always beat word knowledge. I play against people on-line and in RL who use either an electronic scrabble dictionary (franklin mint edition from way back) or websites. And unless they have a bunch of time it still does not help them win. You only have 25 minutes before you start getting hit with a 10 pt per minute or fraction of a minute penalty in tournament rules. I love beating the idiots who use websites, because they nerdrage and accuse me of cheating when they are the ones cheating and losing.
wtf? declaring AFTER you see the dice results?
We go one better. We allow an infinite level of 'undo's on any move. After an attack, either player can decide that attack or even the entire turn didn't count and the board is rolled back to a previous state. The benefit of this is we play really sharp games with few sub-optimal moves. The downside is we've never yet finished a game.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
NASA-speak frequently involves sentences consisting entirely of articles, prepositions, and acronyms. Half our "words" turn out to be backronyms, and some nested acronyms (acronyms for strings of acronyms) are easily four or five levels deep.