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Scrabble Rules Changing? Scrabble Proper Nouns Anger Purists

by Jordan Yerman | April 6, 2010 at 02:28 pm

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News of Scrabble Rule Change Sparks Purist Outrage

Scrabble will soon allow proper nouns, roared the headlines. Grammar purists were outraged over the prospect of new Scrabble rules. You could use the A in "outraged" to add "angered", "aggravated" or "annoyed".

The Guardian frothed early and hard, and who could blame any sane fan of Scrabble? Next thing you know, you 'd be able to legally use "D'oh".

Scrabble Facebook FAIL
Scrabulous Feud

Anyway, the consensus was that allowing proper nouns was the equivalent of bumper bowling: introducing n00bs to a game at the expense of actually playing the real game. This is similar to the simmering resentment of guitar purists who hate on Guitar Hero.

Scrabble Trickster: A New Version

But wait! All is not lost! It's all just a ham-handed marketing technique! Turns out that Mattel is putting out a new version of Scrabble in the UK called Scrabble Trickster, which will allow not only proper nowns, but backwards spelling and straight-up letter theft!

Letter theft!

No word on if a US version of Scrabble Trickster is in the offing, but it would seem likely.

That's right: Sugababes, Toyota and Clearasil could soon be coming to a Scrabble board near you, if you're the kind of deviant who embraces expedient marketing decisions.

Go ahead, laugh at their righteous indignation... before you realize that you agree.

Williams said in a phone interview that what's happened is that Mattel, which owns the rights to Scrabble in England, is going to release a completely new version of the game there called Scrabble Trickster, in which anything goes, including the use of proper nouns, spelling words backwards, stealing letters, and so on.

No sign of a txt version of Scrabble, since anyone could make up any series of letters to come up with a spurious acronym.