Scrabble II for Word Lovers
by Donald Sauter
(Dover, Delaware)
A Scrabble II game
Scrabble II for Word Lovers is pure Scrabble with a few small adjustments that bust Scrabble wide open to the longest, and most natural, words played anywhere. Scrabble II is Scrabble raised to a state of near perfection; Scrabble II is Scrabble with a nuclear engine dropped in!
It's freely admitted that modern Scrabble has become a more or less artificial point-scoring exercise having less to do with your vocabulary and anagramming skills than with automatic plays of funny little "valid" letter sequences memorized from official lists.
What's a WORD LOVER to do? Scrabble II!
Scrabble II will have you digging deep into your working vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, and scrambling the tiles in your rack like never before to come up plays of six or more tiles. In fact, compared to the best Scrabble players on earth, your boards will show twice as many words of six letters and longer, and only half as many of the pintsized, worn-out twos and threes.
In a nutshell, this is Scrabble II:
Good words only. (Bluffing is out!)
Conventional dictionary. (I recommend the American Heritage.)
8-tile rack
Extended 21x21 board
.. Outer 3 rows for EXTENSIONS ONLY, meaning . . .
.. At least 1 tile played on the classic 15x15 inner board every play
Incentives for BIG plays:
.. 6-tiler - 20 pts
.. 7-tiler - 50 pts
.. 8-tiler - 80 pts
No plays consisting of just 2-letter words!
Fresh tile set for every game
.. About 100 tiles scooped from a mix of 3 sets.
Try it; one game is worth a million of my words! But, hey, if you like listening to me . . .
Here's an in-depth discussion of each of the small adjustments that gave rise to Scrabble II:
Or, here's a very concise justification of those small adjustments. See the third paragraph of my the Scrabble II rules page, click here.
If you'd like to see at a glance the gaping difference between the words played in Scrabble II versus those played in the highest level, modern, tournament Scrabble, click here.
If you'd like to see the jaw-dropping difference between Scrabble II and modern tournament Scrabble, focusing on a single letter, the Q, click here.
If you'd like to ogle a bunch of good Scrabble II boards, click here.
If you'd like some good satire on what Scrabble II is NOT, click here.
Let me emphasize that you can fire up Scrabble II with a conventional Scrabble set. The players position themselves so the board doesn't need to be turned, and simply let tiles which extend past the board lie on the table top.
Tell me how it went! Let's get a Scrabble II game site going!
Donald Sauter
donaldsauter@gmail.com
What do you think Donald's idea?
Use the Comments area below to have your say...