Super Scrabble

[dougo]

I just read this, from a report by Steve Kurzban about the American International Toy Fair posted to Spielfrieks:

"Super SCRABBLE" is licensed from Hasbro and adds 3 more rows on the familiar board, including quadruple letter and quadruple word squares. The number of letters doubles and permits much more complex words to be formed.

Sounds interesting, but for some reason I'm skeptical. Why hasn't anyone tried this before? Also, I dread the thought of having a rack of 7 "U"s...

Comments

[tombking.livejournal.com]

The number of letters doubles and permits much more complex words to be formed.
Umm how is that possible if you are still stuck with the same lexicon, Okay it would be possible to play a word longer than 15 letters, but how many of those are out there? And how often would you really get a chance to play it.

I bet this was thought of by a marketer and not a game designer.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

At first I thought the rack size was larger, but the picture only has seven tiles per rack. So, yeah, I have no idea how the words are any more complex (assuming that "complex" means "long" and not just "more Zs" or "more blanks"). Maybe he meant "more words that are complex" rather than "words that are more complex"; I can imagine that there's room for more bingos, so an open playing strategy is likely to generate very high scores-- I bet ACBot would be even better at Super Scrabble than he is at Scrabble.