While moving the tiles around on the rack, searching desperately for a high-value word, every geek has thought “Why can’t I play a Linux command? WGET would fit perfectly in that corner and get me a triple word score!”
You could modify the Scrabble rules just slightly to allow:
- Linux commands
- Programming language reserved words
- Plausible dotcom startup names
- Protocols and standards (XML, RSS, etc.)
My wife just beat me in a 2-player game of Scrabble by ten points. She challenged me on grinch, which turned out to be acceptable. It would have been much more awesome if I could have added some letters later to make grinchsit (to watch or care for a young grinch) or perhaps eidgrinch (which could, in theory, be a foul creature that disrupts the Bahá’à new year).
Other ideas for house rules for Scrabble?
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You adopt some of the rules from this game or just play this game instead.
Since the asterisk tile is a regular expression, computer geeks should be comfortable with it.
Peter
PS. The inventor of WildWords.
Hi Peter,
Cool game. Thanks for the link.
I had a similar idea (months later than you did) and decided to see what a reserved word Scrabble dictionary might look like: http://whathesaid.ca/2007/11/05/programming-language-scrabble/. Thank goodness for COBOL (did I just say that?) or it wouldn’t be much of a game.