- Use and receive letter tiles in the same way as normal Scrabble, and generate scores the same as in normal Scrabble.
- When you play a word, it must be a completely new word that doesn't exist in English (or the language of your choice). To complete the neologism, you must write in secret the definition of that word and then announce to the table a sentence with the word in it, without giving away the definition.
- Everyone else at the table writes in secret a single guess as to the meaning of the word, announced only when everyone has written their guess. Anyone who correctly guesses the meaning of your new word also gets the points for the word. For each other player who correctly guesses the meaning of your new word, you also get those points again.
- If your turn produces more than one word, you must write a definition for each word, and each player can guess each of the new words. Repeat the guess-scoring for each word.
- If you explicitly state the definition in your sentence, you immediately lose the points you earned from the word.
Try it out sometime. Let me know how it goes, or if you come up with any other variations to the rules.
2 comments:
I haven't had a chance to try it, but I'm impressed by the intent. Games that use creativity are awesome. I haven't had a chance to test it, but I am suspecious of a few things:
A) one of the biggest problems with Scrabble is that it takes too long. Bananagrams solved that by making the turns simultaneous, Words with friends splits a game up over weeks. Neo-scrabble adds a lot more time to play. Even things like "quickly looking up words in the dictionary" is ambitious. Having players play balderdash between rounds of scrabble is daunting.
B) Scrabble scoring won't work here. Scrabble relies on real words to determine what's a legal move. Without those restrictions, players will just play 7 letter words trying to match as many letters adjacent as possible and hitting as many bonuses as possible. Then you'll need to figure out if those adjacent words are real or how they score. I really suspect that a Scrabble board isn't a good fit.
C) The Sentence. Your clue seems to be really ambiguous. I mean, I definitely want one person to get it, but the more people that get it the worse off my gain is. This is the point I'm really going to need to test the most, because I'm not sure how specific or non specific these want to be.
Using those ideas, I threw together this: bit.ly/FunLW
I'm really excited for NaGaDeMon, and I enjoyed reading about your game. Once I get some play testing done with some various versions, I'll let you know what I find out.
@wobbles
These are some really thoughtful comments. Thanks!
The downtime problem is always a problem in turn-based games. I thought that by involving the other players in a guessing game would reduce the downtime. The length of time in the game could also be reduced by setting a clock. Perhaps play only for an hour, or ninety minutes. Also, in Scrabble today, people check the approved dictionary anyway.
When I thought about the scoring, I realised that the set of undefined words was much bigger than the set of defined words, and I expect someone would play ZQJFCFXC on some bonus squares. I suppose that part of the hidden sense of the game is genuinely neologising. That is, it'll be easier to convey meaning if the new word seems or sounds like a derivative from latin or greek or some other actual word.
My example isn't the best, for sure. That, I imagine, is part of the challenge of the game.
Thanks again for your comments. They made me think more about the game. And I like where you took the game for Fun Letter Word. Very cool.
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