06 April 2010

Proper Names in SCRABBLE?

Supposedly the UK edition of SCRABBLE will allow proper names.

This seems seriously broken, because there’s really no way to know what’s legal or not.

Yeah, the argument about having to memorize SOWPODS has validity, but what will be the arbiter of what’s legal? More proper names get created all the time. And what languages are you restricting this to? Who’s to know what all the last names in Croatia (or Tonga) are.

Essentially, it will become a word game that has nothing to do with words. To me, those are a lot less fun because they’re totally arbitrary.

2 comments:

David Dunham said...

Apparently it's not the UK SCRABBLE, but a spinoff.

Bob Clark said...

I've played Scrabble (and other word games) with a modified rule where a word must show up in a Google search to be legal.

I have mixed feelings: I like the traditional rules, but the "must-exist-in-Google" variant is at least deterministic.