Is Scrabble Together "anti-human", or is it a creative win for accessibility?
Onboarding.
A few weeks back, Mattel launched a new version of the board game Scrabble, called Scrabble Together. While it's far from the first new version of Scrabble ever made, it's a super interesting idea. Scrabble Together arrives on the back of the traditional Scrabble board, and the concept is that it's a cooperative affair. Players sit down with their own letter stacks but then work together. Each turn, everyone has to place a word on the board, but rather than using the numbers on the letters to build a score, the word must complete the conditions listed on at least one of the goal cards that's currently in play. It's the Scrabble equivalent of joining together in Monster Hunter to take down something massive.
Speaking of touchstones, these goal cards are very similar to the ongoing missions you get in a lot of mobile games. One card might ask you to play a word containing a tile worth 5 points. Another might ask you to play a six-letter word. You have three on the go at any one time, and they're replaced when they're completed. Complete 20 goals and you all win the game together. Fail a goal card - and fail after you've run out of one-shot helper cards, which do things like refresh the goal pile, allow players to trade tiles or make blanks - and you all lose the game together.
As has been widely reported, this has made some people a little angry. Fox News' Greg Gutfeld apparently said that playing a game without scoring "is anti-human", which is a fairly serious context in which to place a word game. Mattel, meanwhile, has said that Scrabble Together is for people who might find the original game intimidating. I think this is fair. And, actually, I think Scrabble Together has a very specific use that I'm extremely keen on.
Context: a friend of mine had an elderly relative who used to love Scrabble and Cluedo and all the classic board games. But as they got older, and as memory faltered, as it does, they started to distrust themselves a bit, and a game of Scrabble did become just what Mattel has suggested it could be: a bit intimidating. Just enough to take the edge off the fun. I feel the same thing sometimes playing Wordle while having MS and the slight cognitive fogginess it can bring: I feel an underlying tension as solutions fail to suggest themselves that makes me feel a little odd.
There's been a lot of chatter about how Scrabble Together is aimed at Gen Z, who might feel like they're more into cooperation than competition. That's great, and I pretty much agree with that theoretical Gen Z standpoint! But I also think this could be a wonderful piece of accessibility for all sorts of people.
There's the fact that you're working alongside other players, for starters, and putting aside the general savagery that has always marked Scrabble in our house, where board games have often been blood sports. Camaraderie instead of screaming at each other! (They should do this for Monopoly stat.)
But I also think those goal cards give you a bit more of a nudge to creativity. They eat away at the blank page syndrome that can set in when you have a nearly empty board in front of you and a snarl of useless consonants to pick from. Just knowing you only need a five-letter word, or that you should aim for a certain corner of the board, it's a nudge that can get people moving, to shake them out and set them in a new direction. It's energising, but it's also gently orienting.
It's also just lovely to see a game like Scrabble adapting, changing itself, imagining other things it could be. Scrabble with missions! Did not see that one coming. But now it's here I sort of love it.