Word-game house rules?

[rhu]

introverte and I played Quiddler and Pick Two this afternoon. We both agreed that restricting our words to those that would be legal in Scrabble(R) seemed silly; we instead instituted a house rule that anything findable in NI2 or 11C would be considered a legal play, even if it's an abbreviation, proper noun, or a foreign word found in a phrase common enough to appear in the dictionary. After all, those are crossword-legal; why not use them?

So I was wondering --- are we loosey-gooseys here, or do others out there agree that word games don't have to inherit Scrabble's limited vocabulary?

We also resolved an ambiguity in the Pick Two rules to mean that a blank may be swapped for any other tile that keeps the grid legal, not just for the letter that one intended when one initially played the blank tile.

And what other house rules would you recommend for word games? A three-letter minimum?

Comments

[tinhorn2.livejournal.com]

>>So I was wondering --- are we loosey-gooseys here,
>>or do others out there agree that word games don't
>>have to inherit Scrabble's limited vocabulary?

Both. :)

But really, your cutoff is still arbitrary. Why limit it to NI2 or 11C? Why not include the almanac, atlas, collected NPL Enigmas, and phonebook? Because a line has to be drawn someplace? Isn't that what the Scrabble rules (more or less) did? If "crossword-legal" is the benchmark, why not use phrases as well? There's always a looser goose.

Bottom line (in my view) is that anyone is surely entitled to play the games using any word criteria they'd like. Me, I find OSPD4 to be convenient to carry around for virtually all word games, and I like the one-stop-shopping aspect, rather than having to use more than one book and look in more than one place. (Question -- Under your rules, how much time does someone get to locate a word that's "findable"?) But a (reasonably unambiguously) agreement on what counts is far more important than what resources are actually used. If you believe your choice is appropriate for you, then pretty much by definition it is.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Good points.

We chose NI2 rather than NI3 partly because of its gazetteer so we wouldn't need the atlas. :-)

I don't object to the Scrabble rules for Scrabble. I guess I bristle at the way other word games seem to adopt them by default. There's certainly value in the "one-stop shopping" that OSPD4 offers, but I think there's also value and elegance in being able to play words like "Aesop" (as introverte did today).

You are completely correct that even being somewhat permissive, I wouldn't go so far as to accept any crossword-legal string of letters. MLXVI was a significant year, but it's not a word. Your point about phrases is another excellent one; I would feel good about phrases with dictionary nature but would object to the sorts of "in the language" phrases that one sees in puzzles. "AMTOO" anyone?

So I guess I need to refine my position so it's more consistent and well-defined (so to speak).