Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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The phrase 'crumpled heap' comes to mind.

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Cooperative Scrabble

All players work together to maximize the overall score.
 
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Everyone plays as a single team, and the overall score is the sum of all individual scores. As with regular Scrabble, however, players cannot look at each others' tiles and no table talk coordination is allowed.

Strategies would include: Not grabbing a triple word score if you think another player has higher-valued tiles. Playing words that allow for maximum branching by others. Steering the game towards multiple-letter and word spots, even though this means allowing someone else to grab it.

Instead of playing to beat the other players, this would be a team-building game. Good for kids, teaching them to view the world as a non zero-sum game. For competition, try to beat the overall score from previous games, or compete with a second team who plays on a separate board.

RAbbey, Jan 12 2004

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       This would work well with a second team. It would also mean the manufacturers of Scrabble get a load of sales from almost no further development.
silverstormer, Jan 12 2004
  

       If there were two teams competing, how would they make sure the other team wasn't cheating? (e.g. Yeah, right, "Jackdawlike" on three triple word scores. Sure.)
phundug, Jan 12 2004
  

       cooperative twister is much more fun.   

       nice 1st idea though.
po, Jan 12 2004
  

       [phun] I assumed the teams would take it in turns to play a word. For instance 8 people arouns a table with two boards, possible even a new double printed board.

[po] Not as fun as cooperative naked twister.
silverstormer, Jan 12 2004
  

       I admit, it would be hard to police competition between two or more teams on seperate boards. But it could easily be done in tournament settings where there are judges and/or other observers.
RAbbey, Jan 13 2004
  

       I think you're on to something here. If you add judges for monitoring and disputes, it's a good start. Now, if you want to take it one step more - include referees! Why? Extreme Team Scrabble! ETS allows for open, arbitrary tackling of opposite team members while they are thinking of a word. Penalties are enforced for things such as upsetting the board, tackling while laying tiles, holding, unnecessary roughness, etc. ;-)
DarkVengeance, Jan 13 2004
  

       (po) Maybe a version of this could add some of the moves of twister ~~ make the game boards room size and the tiles 6-inch squares then you'd have to physically place them on the board with both hands, etc. Maybe add points for placement techniques as in scoring for gymnastics...
no12pass, Jan 13 2004
  

       Variations on familiar games are always fun. A close friend and his girlfriend love to play Scrabble. They were in Venice one time, decided they wanted to play and didn't have a set. So they pick one up, but of course an Italian Scrabble set has an entirely different allocation of letters tiles, and somewhat different scoring. It made for an interesting game, considering neither of them knew any Italian words. (WTAGIPBAN)
krelnik, Jan 15 2004
  

       You mean "TRANQUILIZINGLY" on three triple word scores (1049 points) would be considered suspect?
supercat, Jan 15 2004
  

       [supercat] a bit too much time on your hands? [RAbbey] Croissant! I think imozarti's 2-on-2 idea would work best tho.
kryo, Jan 15 2004
  
      
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