Scrabble’s Word Dictionary Gets BIG Update, Messes With Scoring System… Z, Q and X Easier To Play

Many have scratched their heads on ways to play those nasty Scrabble tiles at the end of the alphabet, but now some recent changes to the Official Scrabble Dictionary have evened the playing field for less word-prone players and the pros are not happy…

The game has been around for 75 years and I didn’t really pay much attention to it after childhood until I got an iPhone and everybody and their dog was playing Scrabble, so I jumped on the bandwagon but when I couldn’t keep up the 20+ games at any given time that I had going I had to pull the plug… Now the game might see a huge infusion of new amateur players who can feel like pros when they get wind that those most hated letters are easier to play now.

“Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play.”

Joshua Lewis, a researcher on the topic thinks that the values of those letters should be changed now to make it more fair. He thinks the letter X should be dropped from 8 points down to 5, the letter Z worth 10 points should dip to 6 and the letter Q should still be at 10 or even raised actually. Hasbro says they’re not going to change the tile values though and I for one am in agreement. I’m so used to the values of those tiles now that a change would be the equivalent of telling me that the color blue is really red! However, I’d still play the game anyway if the game execs changed their minds someday.

So, Scrabble isn’t the only game that they’re tinkering with… Monopoly (also owned by Hasbro) is replacing one of their classic tokens too… What next? Change the way chess pieces can move, Nix (execute) characters and murder weapons from Clue, or maybe do away with that game altogether based on it’s premise? Or maybe the guy on the Operation table should ‘sue’ if you screw up his operation! I’m all for updates to increase interest and to educate younger generations on classic games that they may not pick up given today’s fascination with multimedia (like putting them on iPhone or something), but let’s leave some things unadulterated in the original forms shall we?

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[BBC]