Some families have their own idiosyncratic rules for Scrabble. Grant talks about the rules in his house. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Family Scrabble Rules”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
I heard a crazy thing the other day. It turned out not to be true, but I want to share it with you anyway.
Somebody was telling everyone else, and I say somebody, it was the BBC and a bunch of other British newspapers, that Scrabble was going to allow proper nouns to be used on the board.
Oh yeah, the Twittersphere went crazy.
Yeah, it was astonishing, but it turned out that it was just bad reporting.
As Stefan Fatsis wrote for Slate, Mattel, which owns the rights to the game outside of North America, is releasing a card game called Scrabble Trickster. It’s almost nothing like the board game. It’s simply a pretty crummy game dressed up with a quality brand name, Scrabble.
Okay, so nobody’s going to play that Icelandic volcano name on me, right?
No, no.
But I should tell you, you know, in our house, as in many other houses, we have our own Scrabble rules.
Yeah.
Because in general, you don’t play tournament-style Scrabble at home, right?
No, no, no. Just whatever’s there, right?
Here’s the thing. We’re at a point in my house where the official Scrabble dictionary isn’t enough. If you play Scrabble in my house, we have a rule. Any dictionary goes.
Oh, yeah?
And so the effect of that is it stops all of these challenges where people say, well, that’s not a word. You know, it’s actually more fun in our house to let somebody put a completely bogus word down and then just like razz them for the whole rest of the game so they’ll never do it again.
You know, I never get to play Scrabble. Nobody wants to play with me.
And the truth is that I’m terrible at it. I’ve lost the last few times I’ve played.
That’s the question you get a lot, right? Are you good at Scrabble? I bet you’re really good at Scrabble.
And I always tell people, no, it’s about memory and math, and I’m awful at both. It’s not about vocabulary or linguistic knowledge at all. Otherwise, I’d be the champion. I would have a very nice Scrabble trophy at home, and I don’t.
Well, how do you play Scrabble at home? Did you change the rules?
If there’s something new that you do to make the game more exciting and more fun, we would love to hear about it.
Or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.
