Yesterday I was browsing the games section at my local Toys R Us and I came across something that caught my eye. I've seen Hasbro come up with strange editions of Scrabble (and many other versions of their games) to capture a new market including variants of Scrabble that were shaped like Shrek or were reworked for Pirates of the Caribbean. Well, this would appear to be the Star Trek version and, aside from not being a rotating board with fixed tile slots, it looks pretty awesome! Nevertheless, I won't be hoping to see it show up in my games cabinet as I am too married to the original game now. But I was impressed with it and I noticed that it purported to contain a special word list of playable Trek terms and seems to give bonus points to certain words.Check it out:
Then I saw this obnoxious pink version of the game called "Designer's Edition" with everything being in pink and pastels. What's impressive about this board is that it actually folds up, rotates, and has the raised grid ... making the board club and tournament legal. Unlike the Star Trek board it doesn't have distracting images and isn't a non-standard board except for the color scheme. Notwithstanding the color scheme it is probably more tournament legal than the 75th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (the first fold up rotating board Hasbro has made) in that it doesn't sit higher than the opponents rack (you must display your tile count at all times for a Board to be legal. I can't tell you the number of times I heard someone complaining about the new Hasbro color scheme and how confusing it is that the Triple Letter Score is green, Triple Word Score is orange, and the Double Word Score is red (this was especially true at Nationals). My response to this was always that if they had been playing Scrabble that long it shouldn't be an excuse to not know where the bonus squares are.I'm not a big fan of the color change either and I can only imagine the reaction that those players would have if someone showed up with this board:
I'm half tempted to try to show up to a tournament with one of these to see what sort of reaction I would get. Tee hee.
Note: this is the 99th post on this blog.
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