Megan Elizabeth Morris (aka MEM, Megan the M.) is a bonafide professional catalyst and adventurer. As the Ideaschema instigator, orchestrator and autodidact, she is hopelessly addicted to Making Things Happen.Marty and I play a lot of Scrabble lately.
We use this little iPhone app that Tom Guarriello introduced me to, “Words with Friends”. It’s super cute, and you can keep five or six Scrabble games going on forever. (It occurs to me now that I’d better call them Words games, or Scrabble might get mad. Hmm. That’s annoying.)
Anyway, we’ve been playing these awesome Scrabble games using Words with Friends. And it occurred to me that there have got to be a lot of great Scrabble offshoots out there.
So why don’t we have this game somewhere: Phonetic Scrabble. If I have “sirs” on the board and “ease” in my tiles, I should be able to spell “sirsease” (surcease). Aside from the people who will be mad that I am contributing to childhood spelling mistakes, this would be a FUN game. All it would need is software that attributes sounds to letters in a certain order. I’m sure that exists somewhere! It wouldn’t be precise, and that would make it even more fun.
(Aside to Words with Friends people — if you add this game option to your iPhone app, I will enthusiastically beta test it for you!)
What other Scrabble offshoots can you think of? Let’s see if we can get the actual Scrabble company really mad. ;}
PS. I’m kidding. Sort of. I like you, Scrabble company. See: I think your game is good enough to be a household name, a common noun that I can use to apply to any game with similar attributes. That’s good for your brand, as far as I’m concerned.
Update: Haven’t found actual phonetic Scrabble yet, but did find someone speculating about IPA Scrabble. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it’s what we used in music school to properly notate the way words needed to be pronounced in all kinds of languages. My IPA is pretty rusty, but I’d still be really interested in giving this a try. Of course, I’d need to be playing against folks with IPA experience. IPA Scrabble, anyone?
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