"The Scrabble for Africa..."

So mi old pal reminded me about a variation of Scrabble we used to play. Apparently some stand-up comic has thought of the same game. The rules are you have to create new words, then come up with a plausible definition for them. The words must be phonetically plausible, and the other players have to agree on the word being allowed - which has all kinds of Game Theory ramifications about non-communicative cooperation...

But this all has me thinking up new Scrabble based games.

Hasbro say they won't mess with a successful formula - with the exception of Scrabble Trickster - which is well worth a go.

But I can theorize, hey?

So here are 5 other scrabble games...

1. Yorkshire Dialect Scrabble

Same a Scrabble, except there are 10 extra tiles called T' - the Yorkshire contraction for the definite article. This tile is worth 1 point, and MUST precede all nouns. What makes this weird is that you can't change a noun to a verb, for example, in the pic below, I can't add "ER" to "T'CAT", because CATER is a verb, not a noun.

2. Parts Of Speech Scrabble

Extending the idea, some of the 1-point tiles have been replaced by 1-point tiles marked "NOUN", "VERB", "ADJ", "ADV", "PRON" and "PREP". These must precede the word, and again they limit the things you can append to a previous word. Some words become less flexible than they would be in normal Scrabble - for example "RUN" is both noun and verb, but if I played it as a NOUN, I couldn't then add "NING" to the end.

3. Sequential Scrabble

Ultimately, Scrabble is not just about vocabulary and spelling, but also about being able to interlock patterns to get close to a defined ideal - how you place your word to maximise the score. Removing the vocab element, we could have numerical tiles and make up new rules about how they have to interlock

The rule is that moving left to right or top to bottom, the numbers must run in ascending unbroken sequence. The sequence rotates, so after 9 you can continue with 0, 1, 2, etc. It sounds easy, but remember, you only have the 7 tiles on your rack, so you might not be able to make a good sequence in a given move, and all players are equally disadvantaged. Scores are based on tile values.

4. Equation Scrabble

Crossing the ideas a bit, tiles are the numbers 0-9, the equals-sign, remainder ("R") and the basic operators +, -, x and ÷. Numbers are worth numerical value, and everything else is worth 1 point. Equations must be true in non-modulating base-10 integer bracketless arithmetic, with multiplication and division having precedence over addition and subtraction. Equations can have any number of terms on each side, for example, I could change "1+5=6" to 2x1+5=6+1". Division may include a remainder, for example "8÷3=2R2"

5. Tricoleur Scrabble

Slightly more randomised version of sequential scrabble. Tiles are various colours - Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, White and Black. Each line must be made of a repeating pattern of exactly 3 colours, and be at least 3 tiles long. The random part is that for each colour, there are several different point values - so the set of red tiles would have one 6, 5 and 4 point, two 3 and 2 point and eight 1 point tiles.

This is why people call me a nerd...