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

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Boggle was immensely improved by expanding the board by 25%

Not sure if you're being facetious, but I do agree with this statement. (Actually, it was expanded by 56%, to be pedantic.) I also think that the current 10x10 Upwords board is a huge improvement on the original 8x8 board. I think expanding the Scrabble board may be a diminished return, though; just playing Clabbers is a good way to increase word length and scoring while using the same board. And quadruple word score squares just seems like overkill...

Action-packed? Maybe they keep the 25-minutes-per-player tournament rule, which means you'd have to play quite fast to avoid penalties. Or maybe it's simultaneous play or something crazy like that. Still, it wouldn't be as action-packed as Body Boggle.

Re:

[shannon_a]

Not sure if you're being facetious, but I do agree with this statement.

Me, facetious?

No, this was a statement that I entirely meant. I find the original Boggle sadly simplistic, having played the extended board, with its requirements for longer words.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I agree. In fact I prefer to play with a minimum length of five letter words; otherwise, some boards have so many four-letter words that it just becomes a race to see who can write the fastest.