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TEEL: It’s been some time since we’ve done a review together, Edison.
EDISON: An unlucky 13 years, by my count. Wouldn’t have been anywhere near as long if you’d bothered to come after me when I was kidnapped.
TEEL: How many times do I have to apologize for that? It isn’t as though you didn’t get yourself free in the end.
EDISON: After over ten years! They held me captive and had me running errands all over the world for over a decade! How could you think their decoy was really me?
TEEL: We’ve been over this, Ed. It was a difficult time for me; I stopped going to the movies, I stopped writing reviews… there were a lot of distractions. Anyway, our readers aren’t here to read about your wacky adventures; they’re here to read our opinions about board games.
EDISON: We aren’t reviewing movies anymore? Or restaurants?
TEEL: When was the last time I took you to the movies, Edison? Or a restaurant, for that matter?
EDISON: Not since Hawaii. {mumbled} bastard {/mumbled}
TEEL: What was that?
EDISON: Nothing, nothing, I know, you haven’t been going to the movies as much. Mostly you just sit at home by yourself all day.
TEEL: I’m not by myself, Edison. I have you. And the cats. And all these games.
EDISON: Yeah, and when you do go out in the last couple of years, it’s to go play board games. Board games at home, board games when you go out, board games with me, board games with your wife… *grumble* I can’t believe you didn’t invite me to your wedding!
TEEL: I didn’t know where you were, or how to contact you!
EDISON: You didn’t even know I was gone, Teel! You didn’t believe it was really me until I pulled that old, lifeless stuffed monkey out of the bin you’d shoved it into when you moved. You thought that thing was me, and you didn’t even take it to Vegas with you!
TEEL: You weren’t the only one whose life became complicated in the years you were away. Things were … strange. There was an incident with a fairy, and her dragon, and then a downward spiral into formulaic novels…
EDISON: Some of your novels are terrible, I’ll agree, but I wouldn’t say it was the last few…
TEEL: Look, we can review my books another time, if you want to. We’re here to talk about Scrabble.
EDISON: Why Scrabble? You have so many other, much better games. So many more *modern* games. You even have a few games so new that their reviews would actually be relevant to our readers. Why start with Scrabble?
TEEL: You know as well as I do that Scrabble is where my board game collecting really began. I’d already begun my Scrabble collection before we went to Maui, though most of its growth was over the next couple of years.
EDISON: How many copies of Scrabble does one person need? This stack is almost as tall as you are!
TEEL: Forgiving that they’re also on top of the table, sure. But I’ve recently begun paring down my collection some. I’ve sold a few copies to Bookmans, and have 3 more in a box to head that way again in the future. The stack you’re standing on contains almost no duplicates—each box is a different game.
EDISON: What are you talking about? I can read the boxes myself and every one of them is Scrabble.
TEEL: Well let’s begin, inexplicably, with the bottom of the pile: My beautiful Onyx Edition Scrabble. I’ve owned at least five different versions of “deluxe” Scrabble and two or three copies of the standard edition (including a beat-up copy from the 50’s) over the years. In a “deluxe” edition the biggest selling points are usually that there’s a raised grid on the board so your letters don’t move around when you’re laying new ones–
EDISON: Or if you bump the table.
TEEL: –Yes, or if you bump the table, or spin the board too quickly. Which is the other differentiating factor of a “deluxe” edition: The board has some mechanism which allows it to spin 360º, so every player can be looking at a face-up board when placing their tiles.
EDISON: I wonder whether any of your modern board games would be assisted by adding a lazy susan to the bottom of the board…
TEEL: I can’t imagine how you could actually implement it without sending stacks of cards flying, but probably something like Legendary, or most other Ascension-style deck building games—there’s a lot of tiny text to read on each card, there are hundreds of different cards between the different decks, they’re fully randomized, and they can only face one or two players at most.
EDISON: Yeah, but Legendary has become so complicated, with so many different stacks of cards, that they’ve completely abandoned the board in favor of a rolled up play mat.
TEEL: I’m sure there were manufacturing and quality concerns as well, but yeah. Although it would be nice to have all the cards facing each player on every turn, it’s totally impractical to implement. A lazy susan wouldn’t come close.
EDISON: But for this Onyx Edition Scrabble a simple turntable is sufficient?
TEEL: Yeah, with a reasonable quality turntable, a heavyweight board, and a raised grid, the Onyx Edition hits all the basics of “deluxe” Scrabble. That isn’t the only why it’s one of the few copies of the classic game I’ve kept in my collection; it also has these great wooden letter tiles—black tiles with silver inlay lettering. It has black wooden tile racks, a velvet [-like] tile pouch, a sand timer [I never use] with silver plastic and black sand, and a thick, shiny, hardbound score pad. Of all the versions of the core game of Scrabble I’ve owned, this is my favorite.
EDISON: It isn’t even all that premium. Have you seen this Franklin Mint Collector’s Edition Scrabble, with 24k gold-plated letter tiles, a real wooden board with a built-in [real] velvet lined drawer for storage, and lots of real gold trim all around? Why isn’t this the prized copy of your ridiculous Scrabble collection?
TEEL: Are you prepared to spend $300 to $500+ to buy me a slightly-fancier edition of a game I already own over 20 versions of?
EDISON: …No…
TEEL: I didn’t think so. Anyway, the Onyx Edition was over $60, which was why I didn’t buy it, myself—I had a good enough Deluxe Edition from the mid-90’s that played fine. Luckily for me, my sister was very thoughtful and bought me the Onyx Edition for my birthday one year. Of course, if you’d kept any of the treasures you were stealing from all over the world for your captors, you could have gotten me the Franklin Mint Collector’s Edition Scrabble for my birthday, next month.
EDISON: I barely made it out of there with my life. And the treasures were gone by that point.
TEEL: Which is why the Onyx Edition Scrabble will be the prized centerpiece of my Scrabble collection for the foreseeable future; I am perfectly happy with that situation. The quality improvements of the Onyx Edition actually make the game more likely to be played than my favorite version—at least in part because my copy of my favorite variation of Scrabble doesn’t have a raised grid or a turntable.
EDISON: Oooh, which one is your favorite?
TEEL: I’ll get to it later, but first I want to cover the other two copies of Scrabble I own which offer no variation on the gameplay of basic Scrabble, already so elegantly fulfilled by the Onyx Edition: My Diamond Anniversary Edition Scrabble and my Travel Scrabble. The Travel Scrabble, which is not the tiniest version of Scrabble I’ve ever owned, has these itsy-bitsy lock-in letter tiles. They lock into the board, they lock into the tile racks, and the tile racks lock into the back of the board—you can not only play this version of Scrabble on the go, but you can stop mid-game, leave the tiles in the board, lock your rack away with the letters face down (so your opponents can’t see what you had), and pick it back up again later… say, at the next rest stop.
EDISON: Have you ever actually played Travel Scrabble on a road trip, Teel?
TEEL: No… I usually either forget it’s there –I keep it in my car at all times– or we’re too engaged by whatever we’re actually doing on our road trip.
EDISON: So why keep it in your car?
TEEL: Partially out of habit at this point, but largely because of the potential it represents. Realistically, one of the main reasons we haven’t played it on the road is that I’ve never taken a road trip with a) more than myself and one other person, or b) where we make any non-destination stops; I drive straight through, day and night.
EDISON: Because you’re crazy.
TEEL: Yes, because I’m crazy. Which I believe our readers were probably aware of as soon as they saw you standing atop that mad tower of Scrabble.
EDISON: Which we’ve only barely begun to cover.
TEEL: Correct. But look at my Diamond Anniversary Scrabble! It’s got a set of tiles almost exactly like the black & silver tiles of my Onyx Edition, but with these fancy diamonds on the blanks.
EDISON: So the blanks aren’t actually blank?
TEEL: No, but that’s fine—it doesn’t affect gameplay at all; mechanically the traditionally-blank tiles are merely wilds—decorating them is a purely cosmetic change.
EDISON: I’m a stuffed animal, Teel, not an idiot. I was making wordplay, not failing to comprehend game mechanics.
TEEL: Sure, and I was being intentionally pedantic.
EDISON: Agreed.
TEEL: As you can see, the board is all plastic, and the tile racks are curved plastic. The board folds in half into a convenient self-carrying case with a built-in handle and drawers for components, and–
EDISON: It doesn’t look like you can fold it in half with a game in progress like the last one.
TEEL: No, you can’t. You have to put the letters away into the bag, into the drawer first.
EDISON: So it isn’t as convenient.
TEEL: Sure. Fine, but the outside of the board has little rollers on the corners so it’s its own turntable, and the face of the board has a raised letter grid, so it’s got all the features of a “deluxe” edition of Scrabble, plus nicer tiles, in a relatively convenient format for travel. Which is why this is the version of Scrabble I’m usually willing to take along with me to a game night—smaller, more convenient, and less prized than my Onyx Edition, but more easy to play with than Travel Scrabble.
EDISON: I thought you said Travel Scrabble was convenient.
TEEL: For certain definitions of convenient. Those locking tiles really lock in. It’s quite frustrating to try to slide them into or out of your tile rack, which makes brainstorming words a pain, and then cleanup at the end of the game is a nightmare as each letter tile must be painstakingly pried loose from the board, one at a time.
EDISON: The Diamond Anniversary Edition does suddenly seem pretty convenient.
TEEL: Exactly. But it doesn’t fit under the seat of my car, so it hasn’t replaced Travel Scrabble for the “always with me” honor.
EDISON: So that’s the copies with the Scrabble gameplay everyone is already familiar with. What’s next?
TEEL: Well, as long as we’re on the subject of “travel” editions, I happen to have something here called Scrabble Scramble To Go!. It’s a dice cup, a bunch of letter dice, a sand timer, and a tiny, partial Scrabble board. I haven’t played this one much, but basically you roll [up to] 7 letter dice and have 60 seconds to make a word from them and score it. Unused dice go back into the pool for the next player, they roll [up to] 7 dice and form a word that intersects the first word, a la standard Scrabble, scoring it immediately—and then they remove the first player’s word from the board (excepting letters used by any newly-formed word(s)) and put those dice back in the pool. Play continues until … 200 points, I guess.
EDISON: Sounds interesting. A really good player who knows all those weasely little two-letter words could really screw you by tying all the dice up on the board; there are only 15 dice.
TEEL: I haven’t played it much, but that seems to be the case. I have two other Scrabble games with dice—though really it’s two different editions of the same game.
EDISON: Shouldn’t you get rid of one?
TEEL: *nod* I should, yes. So, in Scrabble Brand Sentence Cube Game–
EDISON: That’s really its name?
TEEL: Seems to be. This one I have literally never played.
EDISON: But you keep two versions of it around.
TEEL: Don’t ask. I don’t know. Anyway, according to the rules–
EDISON: I don’t see a rulebook.
TEEL: Back in olden times, Selchow & Righter, the original publisher of Scrabble, printed the instructions directly into the lids of their game boxes.
EDISON: Let me see that.
EDISON: So weird. But I guess it saves paper?
TEEL: Maybe. You can’t easily lose the rules, this way.
EDISON: True. Hey, did you happen to notice these rules require a lot of … well, for the game to be any fun you have to be playing with pretty permissive friends. You roll the dice and each die has a word on it, and you just … you sit there and build a sort of a crossword out of complete sentences. Except they can’t be particularly complete sentences, with this set of words.
TEEL: Sure, and proper grammar would be a challenge, as well. Which reminds me of another game I own.
EDISON: Not another version of Scrabble, I hope?
TEEL: Of course another version of Scrabble! Look at this one, it’s Scrabble Rebus! The tiles come in four colors, representing four … subsets of … rebus-y things! Some are words, others are letters, and many are logo-like images, and on your turn you get to try to assemble a coherent phrase or sentence out of ’em.
EDISON: Sounds like hell.
TEEL: It isn’t all that bad, depending on what sort of people you’re playing with. Anyone really challenge-happy, and you’re all gonna have a bad time. Alternatively, if you’re playing with a CAH-happy crowd, the game will get very …suggestive, I’ll say, very quickly.
EDISON: Scrabble Rebus is not the game I expected to be more innuendo-filled than normal, but I guess it makes sense.
TEEL: Which one were you thinking of?
EDISON: Scrabble Me. Verbing nouns that way usually turns them instantly into innuendo.
TEEL: That’s not a bad game to go to next, since it has something in common with Scrabble Scramble To Go!—a small, partial Scrabble board; in this case, one board for each player.
EDISON: Getting into the multiplayer solitaire, are we?
TEEL: Exactly. You play on your own board, one word at a time simultaneously with the other players, and then starting with the player who scored lowest and proceeding clockwise each player draws one tile at a time to replenish up to seven. They never have to worry about what other players play, really, they can just focus on making the best words and scores they can with their own semi-random letters. It’s pretty good, as far as player isolation goes.
EDISON: Wait; what does it matter that they draw replacement tiles one at a time in circles? Does that affect probability of what comes out of the pouch, somehow?
TEEL: See the little plastic “podium” with face-up letter tiles on it?
EDISON: Do players get draw from there? How many tiles are there supposed to be?
TEEL: Three per player, replenished each round after everyone has finished drawing tiles—and each player, for each letter they need to draw, may choose whether to take one from the podium or one at random from the pouch.
EDISON: Still sounds very non-interactive, though. You’d only be taking a particular letter because you need it, rather than to block your opponent, since their racks are still secret information.
TEEL: Exactly. It’s an extremely non-confrontational, non-interactive version of Scrabble.
EDISON: But I bet you have a really interactive and confrontational one for us next, don’t you?
TEEL: Uhh… Let me see here… I suspect the most interactive versions of Scrabble would be the ones where each player only plays one letter at a time, so their opponents are quite likely to change what they thought they were spelling out mid-word. For those we go back to 1966 for RSVP and 1971 for RPM.
EDISON: Check out the box art! Has a woman ever looked at you like that over a game of RSVP?
TEEL: I think the only woman I played a full game with was my sister, so no. Not at all.
EDISON: Too bad.
TEEL: The image on RPM is even sillier to me; they’re so pensive, which is ridiculous.
EDISON: Scrabble tends to be a very pensive game.
TEEL: I’ll explain in a minute. First let’s look at RSVP. It’s another one with the instructions printed directly into the lid of the box, and the letter grid rises vertically from the table. RSVP is strictly two player, because you play from opposite sides of the same board, alternating back and forth one letter at a time as I implied earlier.
EDISON: How do you challenge one letter?
TEEL: You don’t. Well, you can only place a letter cube –and they aren’t dice; they have the same letter on every side– in a row or column where its placement could potentially form a valid word when looked at from your side of the board. So vertical words are totally shared, but horizontal words can create some crazy frustrations.
EDISON: I don’t see a letter pouch, or racks.
TEEL: That’s a weird thing, to me; I suppose it’s to try to make up for the frustrations of all horizontal words, but on your turn you can just choose any remaining letter from the box. And you play to a pre-determined score of your choosing; “usually” 100 points. It isn’t the best game, but it is one of the more interesting experiments in Scrabble-like games by Selchow & Righter.
EDISON: You say that, but I’m sitting right here on a game with a round Scrabble board!
TEEL: True. RPM is another interesting experiment. Very competitive, very interactive, very weird. it’s got elements of a dexterity game, which I’m not fond of, combined with that one-letter-at-a-time nonsense from RSVP which makes it nigh-impossible to do anything but react to what’s in front of you.
EDISON: Sounds ever more ridiculous. Have you been sorting them intentionally? Will my mind explode by the end of the review when you pull out a Scrabble game that transcends reality?
TEEL: I only wish. Alas, RPM is probably the penultimate example of Scrabble ridiculousness; after Scrabble Up, it’s all downhill.
EDISON: You did that on purpose.
TEEL: Maybe.
TEEL: Getting back to the matter at hand, in RPM you get a double-ration (actually 15, plus 5 same-colored blank tiles) of random letter tiles, but no tile racks since there’s no real worry about secrecy—once the game begins you won’t have time to look to your left or your right to see what your opponents are doing. The round board is divided into four quadrants, each with two rows for letters, and each player gets to seed the first letter on each row with a letter from their pool before things get going. During play the circular board with its divided quadrants (but not the player dividers) rotates around at a moderate pace, and each player may add one letter from their pool to each quadrant of the board as it goes by—they may not reach over their divider, and the letters added must potentially be part of a valid word. If they complete a word (and have time) they may add a blank tile of their color after the last letter of the word—players get points for valid words marked by their color after the board has finished 5 full revolutions.
EDISON: I’ve just noticed something.
TEEL: You’ve been staring at the rules for a long time; what’s caught your eye?
EDISON: This isn’t much of a review.
TEEL: What do you mean?
EDISON: Well, for starters, you aren’t saying anything about what the games are actually like to play, or whether you like them. Actually, for several of the games, I’m not sure whether you’ve played them at all or merely read the rules.
TEEL: I’ve played most of them. I told you I hadn’t played Scrabble Brand Sentence Cube Game. I don’t think I’ve played all the variants in Scrabble Switch-Up, either.
EDISON: But do you like them? Would you recommend them? Who would you recommend them to? Are they any good?
TEEL: Most of these games were collected via eBay over several years of searching and bidding. I’m not sure whether any of them are currently in print—certainly not my beloved Onyx Edition Scrabble, or any of the Selchow & Righter experiments from the 60’s & 70’s. I can’t exactly recommend them in good faith, knowing most people won’t be able to get their hands on a copy or ever play them.
EDISON: You certainly could, Teel. Geek & Sundry recently posted a listicle of the top 10 out-of-print games most people will never get ahold of or play which they think you should “snap up” if you ever get the opportunity. Whether people can actually play the game isn’t as relevant to this being a review as you expressing your opinions about the games.
TEEL: Well, alright, you’re right, I haven’t played most of these games more than a few times. They certainly aren’t in heavy rotation. This is a Scrabble collection, and it has been the entire time. The collecting was always more rewarding than the actual playing of the games—my interest was in how many different variants of Scrabble had been published. Vertical, two-way Scrabble! Spinning Scrabble! Rebus and dice and rolling marbles!
EDISON: So you like the idea of the existence of the different games more than you like actually playing them.
TEEL: Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.
EDISON: Tell me how.
TEEL: It’s Scrabble! Even among old-school/classic board games, Scrabble is considered boring by a lot of players. Right now I have a hard enough time arranging to play board games with anyone at all; getting them to show up for board games and then play Scrabble seems to be a bridge too far. And if I do believe I’ve got a group together who would consent to Scrabble, I’m almost always going to go with a satisfying game of Scrabble itself—not only because I won’t have to teach people whatever wacky variant rules pop up in my collection, but also because sometimes the games fall flat.
EDISON: Ah, good, here we come. Actual opinions about the gameplay.
TEEL: Okay, so right now I think the worst one is TV Scrabble. The best thing about it is how meta it is: From 1984 to 1990 (and again in 1993) there was a TV game show loosely based on Scrabble—called Scrabble. Selchow & Righter published an official home version of the TV game show—so TV Scrabble is a board game loosely based on how a TV game show is played and that TV game show was based loosely on a board game of the same name… and the meta is wonderful, but the gameplay is … lackluster, at best. Very weird, by Scrabble standards, by modern standards …by any standards, really. It just doesn’t work.
EDISON: Well, great! What did you think of these other games? Any other stinkers?
TEEL: Scrabble Up is bordering on incomprehensible—two players are simultaneously trying to form words from a line of letter tiles before a marble reaches the bottom of a long ramp, I guess, but we definitely spend more time trying to figure it out than playing it—on the rare occasions it comes down from the shelf.
EDISON: Isn’t part of the problem that you go so long between plays? If you figure out how to play Scrabble Up today, won’t it go easier tomorrow, and next week, and perhaps be enjoyable after a few non-confused plays?
TEEL: Maybe some of them, sure. Not Scrabble Up, though. Not for me. Probably not RPM, either—I’m just not a fan of dexterity games.
EDISON: Which is fine, and a totally reasonable thing to say in a review. What about the others? Did you like Scrabble Me?
TEEL: It has a problem that a lot of modern multiplayer solitaire games have: Many people don’t want to play them. In fact, while I really do enjoy multiplayer solitaire games in general, I’m not sure I really feel like Scrabble is improved by its addition—I spend so much of my time in Scrabble just staring at my letters and back and forth to the board, ignoring the other players until the moment they place a word that unintentionally blocks or assists me—it’s already very much a multiplayer solitaire game without modification.
EDISON: Fine, and I suppose something similar is true for RSVP? A forced two-player limit means it isn’t welcome at a game night, right?
TEEL: Well, that’s how it feels. I did take it to a game night once—over a long series of weekly game nights I brought my entire Scrabble collection. By the point we reached RSVP it was clear that no one wanted to play Scrabble against me; I’m nowhere near as good at the game as tournament players, but I easily won almost every Scrabble variant I brought to the table. I like words. I mean, obviously; look at how long this review has gotten.
EDISON: Pretty long. Do you suppose anyone will read down this far?
TEEL: Some brave few, I suppose. Maybe they’re skimming along, trying to find out which variant I prefer over classic Scrabble.
EDISON: Maybe. I mean, at least it’s an opinion.
TEEL: Sure. But the point of the review wasn’t really to tell people whether I like Scrabble variants. Obviously I like Scrabble variants; I own twenty distinct gameplay variants (counting the PotC copy in my to-be-sold box, which lets you score a few proper nouns and has special ‘walk the plank’ tiles) and one of my absolute favorite modern games is effectively a Scrabble variant!
EDISON: So what was the point of the review? I don’t think I was properly briefed. You just grabbed a stack of games and set me down to talk about them—we haven’t even played any of them together! This whole thing is like sitting down to write a film review of a movie you haven’t seen, at least for me. What are we doing, here?
TEEL: I hinted at it in the beginning; collecting Scrabble variants foreshadowed my current board game addiction. My appreciation of all these different variations from a single core mechanic was repeated a few years ago when I spent years (and hundreds and hundreds of dollars) playing all sorts of variations on deck-building games—and then designed a bunch of deck-building games.
EDISON: You made a bunch of them? I’ve only seen Teratozoic. What happened to the others?
TEEL: Recycled, mostly. Not all game designs are good enough to move forward with. Sometimes that’s because the gameplay isn’t there, it isn’t fun or it’s fundamentally flawed. Other times it’s because publishing a board game is expensive, so unless the game you’re designing has the potential to become popular, there isn’t a good reason to try to publish it—the costs incurred between a great prototype and a published game, or even just a great-looking Kickstarter campaign to try to raise the actual printing and art costs, can be astronomical. Since I’m not just sitting on piles of ready cash, a lot of my designs and ideas get developed, prototyped, play-tested, and recycled without ever really seeing the light of day.
EDISON: That’s a little disappointing. I thought the point of crowdfunding was to raise the money for creators who don’t have the cash.
TEEL: To a certain extent, yes, sure, that’s what crowdfunding is for—but in a much bigger way, it only works to the extent that your creation has mass appeal. A key word in Crowdfunding is “crowd”, and if you have a niche product, or an unmarketable product, there doesn’t exist a crowd of people willing to put up the money to get it made. Even the difference between a small crowd and a large crowd can be significant—Teratozoic had hundreds of backers who together pledged over six thousand dollars, which sounds great, but just to hit the minimum print runs for mass production would have required at least double the backers and/or pledges. Just five or six hundred backers would have been plenty, and in terms of crowds that’s really, really moderate; there are movie theatres here in town which can seat that many people in a single auditorium, and the baseball stadium near here can seat almost a hundred times as many. In all the world, it ought to be easy to find a crowd of five hundred.
EDISON: But it isn’t. So you design & develop games and then recycle them, never to be seen again. That’s really sad, Teel.
TEEL: It’s okay. At least I had the financial freedom and time to design, develop, and prototype them—that’s not exactly cheap, either. Especially for hobby projects you’re going to quickly throw away.
EDISON: Still really sad. But I think we’ve veered way off topic again. We’re still supposed to be talking about Scrabble, right? Or at least how your Scrabble collection relates to the rest of your collection?
TEEL: Sure. Where was I?
EDISON: You’d gotten as far as developing deck-building games.
TEEL: Fine, uhh… well, I’ve also been developing card drafting games?
EDISON: So, what, you collected a bunch of variants on card drafting games to study before digging in and making your own?
TEEL: Yes and no. I did buy up a bunch of the most popular drafting games to study, and I have used what I’ve learned to develop two or three drafting games, but also… I developed and published a card drafting game before I even owned a single other drafting game. And I haven’t even come close to publishing the others.
EDISON: Do you realize how ridiculous you are?
TEEL: I’m having a conversation with a stuffed monkey about my collection of 20+ Scrabble variants. At 3AM. I’ve got an inkling.
EDISON: Is it contagious?
TEEL: It’s too late for you. Just be glad you’re still a voice in my head.
EDISON: I don’t think we should dig too deeply into that one.
TEEL: My head?
EDISON: SoooOOOooo… About these other Scrabbles…
TEEL: Okay, okay, how about a quick rundown of what’s left? Let’s see, we have Scrabble Overturn, where the letters are all cylinders with the same letter in four colors; when you put down a word, you turn all the letters in that word to your color—including those intersecting with other words. Scoring doesn’t happen until the end of the game, and you only get points for valid, complete words in your color.
TEEL: Scrabble Upwords is just Upwords with Scrabble branding; the tiles are made to stack, and you can build right on top of words already on the board—as long as the new letters also form valid words. Upwords was an underdog competitor to Scrabble for decades; I’m not sure what corporate licensing deal happened to create Scrabble Upwords, I only know I didn’t buy Upwords until it was an official Scrabble variant.
TEEL: I have a couple of Scrabble card games: Scrabble Word Play Poker and Scrabble Turbo Slam. The latter I’ve played once but have no recollection of how it played, just that I didn’t particularly want to play again. Scrabble Word Play Poker was a gift, and I’ve never opened it. I assume it plays how it sounds.
TEEL: I also have Scrabble Switch-Up, which is a family-oriented, modular-board based Scrabble containing 6 variants in 1 box. One of the variants is classic Scrabble. Four of them have custom-printed boards with obstacles and boosts (and sometimes cards, and special tiles) which change up the basic Scrabble gameplay; things like “Hyper-Race” where your first word is at one end of the board and the first person to make a word which reaches the bottom wins, or “Free For All” where your words don’t even need to be linear. The final variant is a set of 9 double-sided mini boards which can be used to modify the classic board’s arrangement of bonuses (and add wilds). I don’t think I even tried all the variants in this one; by the time I got it, I was already feeling Scrabble fatigue.
TEEL: Finally, my favorite Scrabble variant, for which I wish I could get a proper deluxe version (there’s a sorta-deluxe version with undersized locking letters; I want full size wood letters and a raised grid on a spinning board—I can make room for it, I swear!)—the amazing Super Scrabble. Double the number of tiles (and thus a slightly improved letter distribution), a lot more spaces on the board, and the addition of quadruple letter and quadruple word spaces… If you love Scrabble, this is more of that, heaped up and running over. I love long words, I love having so much room to work with (and so little chance of being blocked in), and I love how big the scores can get (without resorting to internet assistance!). If you love Scrabble, and if you have people who are still willing to play Scrabble with you, then I highly recommend Super Scrabble!
EDISON: Look at that, it only took a billion words to get to an actual recommendation. I’m so proud of you. Is that it, are we ending on a high note?
TEEL: Sorry, no, I have one more thing.
EDISON: But you’re all out of Scrabbles. Are you hiding another Scrabble somewhere? Is there a tiny Scrabble you always keep up your–
TEEL: I used to have a very tiny Scrabble set, which was built into the end of a ballpoint pen. The tiny board unfolded to about two inches square, and the letters were printed on teeny-tiny square bits of magnet. It was totally impractical, I knew I would never, ever play it, and I discarded it.
EDISON: Alright, no bodily-stowaway Scrabble, then; what are we waiting for?
TEEL: Paperback, by Tim Fowers.
EDISON: This box doesn’t have the word Scrabble anywhere on it. What’s in the box?
TEEL: It’s mostly what you’d get if Scrabble were a deck-building game, and I love it. It’s by far my favorite Kickstarter game, and certainly one of my favorite modern board games, full stop. The cards have letters on them, they have values on them, and the more expensive cards have increasingly-interesting extra abilities on them. On your turn you try to put together a valid word from the letters on the cards in your hand (and, potentially, one “common” letter that anyone can use), and you get t spend the value of the letters in the word you build to buy more letters for your personal deck. You start with R, S, T, L, N, and five wild cards, and your purchases determine the shape of the words you’ll be able to form for the rest of the game. Replayablity is seemingly infinite, on account of words and letters—unlike most deck-building games which require frequent expansions to stay fresh, Paperback has no need for expansions until we start adding letters to our alphabet.
EDISON: Sounds like you really like this one. Can we play?
TEEL: Sure. What good are you in a games review if you haven’t experienced the games? I’m not sure what we’ll tackle next time, but I definitely plan to play through each of the games with you before we review them.
EDISON: That sounds nice. It’s good to be back.
TEEL: I’m glad you finally made it back. I hope we can get through my entire collection.
EDISON: And maybe someday we’ll review a new game or two…
TEEL: Maybe someday.
