My only Scrabble-related memory as a kid was playing the word "rape" because I'd seen it online but didn't know what it meant. Things got a bit awkward.
Games are not meant to be fun. Games are meant for instilling discipline and life lessons. Losing at Scrabble made me the self made landlord that I am today.
They're taking out the scoring system and you have to do challenge cards such as getting a word on the border, making it horizontal or it has to have so many letters. The winner is the first person to do 20 of those. You can also make teams.
sounds like a good move tbh, as someone who plays a lot of Scrabble and Bananagrams there's a reason 80 percent of the time I reach for the latter. The scoring in Scrabble is probably the most annoying part of it - the "meta" that forms around specific placements thanks to 3X scores, the amount of times you will all just sit there in silence trying to find the maximum score instead of having fun
My first thought was that. Many smaller board game makers are doing well with cooperative games, and it sounds like an easy way to do that with an established brand. Cooperative scrabble sounds like a lot of fun to me.
This is probably just another desperate attempt by Big Board Game to stay relevant
Because I legitimately am having a hard time trying to figure out what they could possibly change in order to make it more inclusive or less competitive aside from just inventing a cooperative version where you try to fill the board with as many big letter words as you can and add the points collectively
The death of the American Board Game is nigh. Long live the reign of Eurogames.
Better game nights are possible when you realise that board games don't have to be all the exact same 50+ year old Parker Bros shits that either take 5 hours, are incredibly bullshit games of chance, or both.
Word games in general are massively popular on mobile these days, not just wordle. These are all basically some variant of the core challenge of scrabble so they're probably trying to figure out how to surf this wave.
It's just a rules update to make game play faster so a game isn't just 2 hours of looking at a hand of useless vowels.
They could be accused of trying to copy video game like objectives but board games have also been largely replaced with digital versions of the game so makes sense.
How tf does easier = more inclusive? Do you still have to spell shit? Then its still just as barring for people with issues with spelling shit. Removing barriers makes things inclusive, and that often means things get easier, but it doesn't have to and it doesn't go the other way as I've just argued.
And what would they do to make it easier? Hand in a dictionary? Smh corporations are fucking stupid. People aren't buying Scrabble because it's not woke or inclusive enough, people aren't buying Scrabble because everyone already owns the game! You won! You're done! The game is in every attic! It's fucking over go home! Make a new game! You don't have to keep doing this! I feel like I'm in that sketch from collegehumor about Oreos FFS.
As far as I can understand they're introducing challenge cards and making it cooperative? That sounds like fun, but hey ITS A NEW GAME CONGRATULATIONS YOU MADE A NEW GAME YOU DONT HABE TO KEEP MAKING SCRABBLE.
Also scrabble is fun and if you're spending 2 hours, then you're doing it wrong. Unless you're having fun, then you're doing it right.
You can always just play with alternative rules.
A new version of Scrabble is set to be released for the first time in 75 years
Absolutely zero research done. Let's forget Tile Lock Scrabble and Scrabble Deluxe (and Deluxe Travel Edition) since they don't alter gameplay substantially, but the existence of Super Scrabble (from 2004), Scrabble Junior (from 1958, which is 66 years ago), Scrabble Overturn (1989), Scrabble BINGO (recent), Scrabble Trickster (~2010), and Scrabble: World of Harry Potter (also recent, but ignoring this is fine) clearly refutes their point. And then for looser spin-offs (ex. Scrabble Cards—not to be confused with Scrabble Slam! and Scrabble: Alphabet Scoop (yeah, tell me SAC came out more than 75 years ago)), they didn't specify what a "version of Scrabble" entails, so I'd say it's at best misleading even if we didn't have the other versions.