Posted by damcatlady (Ranked 2 on Scrabble (GameSpy) Ladder) on April 08, 2010 at 08:20:42 PDT:
Tuesday dawned with sputtering Scrabble fans dashing for their dictionaries: Appall! (10 points). Pox! (12 points). Crazy! (19 points).
By day's end, they felt better: Phew. (12 points.) They wished they had enough tiles in their racks to spell apocrypha or exaggerate.
Stefan Fatsis, a Washington, D.C.-based Scrabble coach and devoted chronicler of the Scrabble world, summed up the problem this way: "It's a case of corporate flackery and media incompetence completely misleading the public."
What caused about 10,000 near-heart attacks from London to El Segundo, Calif., began a few days ago with a tiny item in a British trade paper. It referred to Mattel's plans to introduce a kind of Scrabble that would permit the use of proper nouns.
The horror! To Scrabble purists, this would be like lowering the height of the baskets in the NBA, or doing away with the net in tennis. Suddenly, any idiot could spell, say, "Jay-Z," and score a quick 23 points.
The British press grabbed this seed and planted a garden. In their accounts for Tuesday's editions, the holy rules of basic Scrabble were being changed for the first time since they were codified in 1948.
"Stuck at Scrabble? Bring on Beyonce!" said the Daily Mail. "My Word! Scrabble changes rules," said the Times of London. "Dumbing Noun; Scrabble Rules are Changed to Count Names," said the Mirror.
A Mattel spokeswoman who was not identified in any of the accounts told the Telegraph, "We believe that people who are already fans of the game will enjoy the changes." Most of the stories buried as an afterthought another of her comments: "Obviously some people will want to continue playing the old rules, so we will still be selling a board with the original rules."
As the story got picked up in the United States a few hours later, citing British reports, that nuance occasionally fell out of the story.
American Scrabble players checked their calendars. Was it April 1?
"I think it's an April Fools' joke," said Chris Cree, a fork-
lift wholesaler in Dallas who is co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association.
The story was no April Fools' joke, but the way it was being passed around wasn't exactly true, either.
"We're not burying the standard game at all," said Philip Nelkon, promotions manager of Mattel. "It's been around for 60 years, and we wouldn't do anything to affect the crown jewels."
Instead, Mattel plans to introduce something called Scrabble Trickster. There will be squares on the board calling on players to draw cards. The cards might instruct you to forfeit a letter to an opponent - or permit you to spell a proper noun.
But the change is irrelevant to an American Scrabble player. Mattel controls Scrabble only outside the United States and Canada. Here, Hasbro is the maker and marketer of Scrabble. And Hasbro has no plans to introduce a version with new rules, a spokesman said. Scrabble Trickster will not be sold in the United States.
So, for the American Scrabble community, the story is no story.