Scrabble Needs a New Scoring System

innocent_white_lamb writes "A researcher says that some letters are over valued and some are under-valued in Scrabble, due to recent changes to the lists of allowable words. Z and X are now much easier to play and should be worth less, while U, M and G should be worth more than they are now. Joshua Lewis wrote a program to re-calculate the value of each letter to better reflect the current usage. The co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association says that he often hears criticism of Scrabble's scoring system, but any change would bring about 'catastrophic outrage'. A spokesman for Mattel says that they have no plans to change the game."

Comments

Public Outrage?

[ButchDeLoria]

What are they gonna do, send them a letter?

Why not just version the Rules?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just version the Rules? Original, 2012, etc? MTG has new decks come out, new rules come out,old cards removed new added... they did fine (relatively).

The language changes... so should the rules.

Re:Why not just version the Rules?

[Mike Buddha]

Scrabble: The Collectible Tile Game!

You bring your own tiles and devise a set that gives you optimal word options. And the loser is banished from the land of Dominaria.

Mattel?

[mark-t]

Scrabble is Hasbro IP.

Hasbro and Mattel are two *ENTIRELY* separate companies. Rivals, in fact.

Saying that Mattel has no plans to change the game is like saying that Microsoft has no plans to change the iPhone.

It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a game, the iportant thing is that everyone is playing by the same rules. Sure, if you were to develop scrabble today, it might be nice to adjust the values of the letters to reduce the element of chance in the game, but now there is insufficient reason to go and change it. It woudl still have been ok if every letter had the same value.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Kjella]

But would you really want to reduce the element of chance? People like to play poker because although you will lose to a poker pro over time, you can sit down with the world's best poker player and win some hands, while with chess you'll lose to Magnus Carlsen 100 out of 100 times. Making it a pure skills-based game is only fun for the one with the best skill, assuming fun should have anything to do with games.

Flattening the scoring

[Anonymous Coward]

This was brought up during an NPR interview the earlier this week and I agreed with the mentioned counterpoint. While it makes logical sense for a rework of the scoring system, it's effectively flattening it and removing some of the strategy around the unpredictability of the game.

Regardless, Mattel has already gone on record (I believe) stating it will keep the scoring as is.

Re:Flattening the scoring

[Sarten-X]

There are three ways to play Scrabble.

First, there's the novice's strategy. Pull letters from the back, make a word on the rack, and figure out where it can fit. At this level, the game is purely a contest to see who has the biggest vocabulary.

For intermediate players, recognizing words scrambled on the rack is easier, and perhaps even memorizing common anagrams is a viable means for improvement. Multiple options are planned, and bonuses (including making multiple words) figure into the decision.

Experts use the letters more as a means to control the board, under the assumption that their opponent has perfect tiles to use opportunities open to them. The game is less about words, and more about controlling what options the other player has available. A low-scoring word may be the best option if it means that future plays will be better. The whole playable dictionary is memorized, and anagrams are recognized naturally. This is not to say that words are unimportant, but rather that the game is more of strategy than chance for experts.

Whether a particular letter actually matches its distribution means practically nothing to the really competitive players. The score total of each play, though, is something these players have spent years refining.

Source: One of my in-laws is one of the top 5 Scrabble players in his state. I know exactly how poorly I play... and I had a cheat sheet and help.

Damn.... my bad for not RTFA...

[mark-t]

Okay, yes. Mattel *DOES* make Scrabble... but only *outside* North America.

Considering the second-last sentence in the summary just mentioned the "North American Scrabble Players Association" right before Mattel, I trust you can understand my confusion. The article clarifies the point by noting that Mattel make Scrabble in Europe.

See these letters as 'bonus' and 'penalty'

[G3ckoG33k]

Many games have these, 'bonus' and 'penalty', and Scrabble appears to be one of them.

It is part of the game and Mattel has no reason to change their rules.

It's a game

[Overzeetop]

If you don't like it, go get yourself some wood putty and a sharpie and make the letters whatever value you damned well please.

Scrabble...?

[snarfies]

What is that, some kind of ripoff of Words With Friends?

It was never balanced

[jfengel]

The guy who developed the game tinkered with the ratio from the get-go: he put in too few "S" tiles to reduce one obvious tactic (playing a word across another by adding an S to it and making it plural, like taking COP and playing SKATE such that you get the points for both COPS and SKATE).

The corpus is all well and good, but real points are scored on Scrabble strategy. Two-letter words are absolutely crucial in Scrabble, since they let you easily double-count each tile you lay down. If you have APE on the field, and I lay down TIN next to it, I can count not just TIN but also AN, PI, and EN.

This is made even more profitable by the addition of (bogus, at least to me) words like QI and ZA (a way of spelling "chi" as in Chinese medicine and a slang word for "pizza" that they somehow decided was mainstream enough). If you leave me [triple letter score]AT on the field, and I have Q and I, I get to count SIXTY POINTS for that Q (plus the I and the AT). (QAT is also pretty damn bogus.)

You can tweak the words according to the corpus, but all it will do to real Scrabble players is to tweak the game, not fundamentally alter it. It's not really a game of practical vocabulary, and never has been, not if you're planning to score well. It's a game of tactics (generally well understood) and an official dictionary with words that often bear only a dim connection to reality.