TINKERING WITH SCRABBLE RULES AND SCRABBLE DICTIONARIES. I have posted here about our family’s changing the rules—and the spirit— of Scrabble to emphasize offense. We find those changes make the game more fun for us. Scoring is more fun than defending. Kay’s problem is more specific, and the solution seems simple. If you don’t like memorizing lists of words, only permit the use of words that everybody in the game knows. Call it the Agreed Dictionary. Everybody has a vote on whether a word is in the Agreed Dictionary when the word is suggested.
A modification of the Agreed Dictionary would be to allow a word that players agree should be permitted because it is a “good word”. Here is an example of how this would work: Kay begins his article by pointing out that the sixth edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary has just been released. Kay gives some of the new words in the dictionary. Of these, “bestie” and “beatdown” might have been voted as words known to all even before the new dictionary; zomboid (resembling a zombie) might have been approved as a “good word”.