Petri writes:

I have developed a new orientation sensor game for Nokia N95, N95 8Gb and N82, that I think will interest you and your audience at geektronica.com.

The game is called “Marble Maze”, and the basic idea is from a classical game, in which you have a board with labyrinth and holes, and you try to guide a metal ball into the goal without dropping into a hole. The thing about N95 and N82 is that those phones have orientation sensor, that enables this kind of idea taken from physical world, to be implemented in the phone.

Check out a Youtube video of the game play with N95:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G3puULvn_E[/youtube]

Another with N82 (with rubber ball):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_C_pz3F8TY[/youtube]

Some features of the game include:

• Use of orientation sensor data of the device to control the game play
• 40 different fields
• Create and save your own fields (and share with friends)
• 3 different balls, with different bounce and friction (metal, rubber and pingpong balls)
• Saving of record times for each field
• Tactile feedback, you can feel the ball hit the walls

You can get the game (or read more about it) here.

Great way to take advantage of the built-in sensors - reminds of me of the slap-Mac hack.

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’í new year).

Other ideas for house rules for Scrabble?