Hello guys.
I am sure there is more people who feel like me. Wouldn't it be cool if we had scrabble in playroom? I personally love this game a lot, and there are many people who don't have rsgames or just simply don't use it and with whom I would like to play this nice game. Honestly speaking I am also sure it would work better here, would be faster and who knows what else, but for sure nicer and more stable. I can imagine it is difficult to implement or needed stuff like dictionaries but if they could do it, I am sure that our boss also can. :] It would be even crazyly cool if we could be able to use different dictionaries and play in our own languages. But that is maybe something of dreamy tomorrow. Let me know if you think similarly and how do you find this idea in general. Thanks for your work and see you around.

I agree I would like to see Scrabble® in the PR but I do understand there are issues. I have been critical of RS in the bast but they did do a very good job with Scrabble®. It is easier for RS to produce this game as they only have to make the game available in English unlike the PR that has several languages to contend with. Aminiel has to be careful of not creating a have and have not PR. I did not like it for example that the English section did not have Quiz party but fortunately we have it now. Personally I don't think it would be good if you had too many games that were available for some and not others.

The English language has over 1 million words and is growing. Brexit and covidiot are two examples of new words that have been added to the English language. A Scrabble® book has words from 2 to 8 letters and gets updated every year. I don't know if RS will update theirs every year or just stick to the one they have. Of course other languages would have the same issue. I was thinking of buying an official Scrabble® book and that is why I know a bit about them.

Another issue for Aminiel is some of the other languages have other symbols and some of the rules in terms of using them could be different.

Hello,

I have never been very keen on implementing scrabble for several reasons, but I'm not completely closed either. Don't expect it, but maybe you could have a nice surprise one day.

The reasons against scrabble includes:

• Language specialties: in french, accented letters aren't taken into account; in german, they do; in spanish, LL is a special token that may or may not be replaced with two L next to one another; etc. I will ahve to deal with all these specific rules, and there are many of them I probably ignore.
• The dictionary: I have to take one for each language, maintain them up to date, and find a way to make lookup fast.
By the way, what should I do if a word is absent ? Simply rejecting it isn't a cool solution, since some people may accept local words or proper nouns. Strictly confirming to official dictionaries can be very frustrating, since most players play only for fun. Of course, in the opposite side, I can't accept anything and assume that players always write correct words. I need to find a solution in the middle, maybe a kind of voting or I don't know what. In any case it isn't as easy as you think.

• Popularity and ease of grid-based games: all grid-based games already present on the playroom don't have a great popularity, and I have heard many people saying that they were simply unable to play them on the playroom if they don't have a physical version next to them. Also, there's already a word game on the playroom: the little exam, and it isn't very popular either. This doesn't encourage me much to develop that kind of games.

Perhaps there could be simpler word games to start with before scrabble ?

I think updating dictionaries year on year for several languages would be a very difficult task. In RS you put down your word tile by tile and the computer decides if your word is valid or not. I feel this is the best way even though there are issues with this system. The issue is that people can put down their word without realising they are joined to other words and if they are valid they would score more than a real game but it is the same for all players. If you let people use their own slang words/local dialect then you will create more disputes between players and we know some of them will go over the top... but if a word is not in the dictionary that they want to use they will accept that and choose something different.

I have not played in RS for a while but a big issue there for scrabble is that if the previous player played the word smart I would not know where they have put the word "smart" on the board. If it is my turn I start in the centre of the board, I have to ask the previous player where they have put their word "smart is" and this can take a lot of time if there are many words on the board.

Like other games it is better to have a physical board but people learn to live with out them.

There are a number of games in the PR that are very good that a limited number only play so that won't change but scrabble is still worth adding to the list of games to add in the future but the biggest issues are already in the previous messages.

Hello,

I know that I should consider it seriously because it would definitely be a great addition. I need to find solutions and maybe I'll do it at some point. Clearly, not soon, but the idea has to make its way to my brain.

I haven't talked about it but there is also the question of bots. They don't need to be very smart, but at least they shouldn't be totally stupid. I see it with chess, people are frustrated, demotivated or at least quite refrained to play when there are no bots, so I must make bots for scrabble, too.

Of course you need to know where the previous word has been placed. For me it looks like an obvious oversight. The simplest is to give the coordinates of the first letter and the direction. For example: YNWA placed "working" horizontally in H6. I assume that those who play in tournaments write down their moves like that.

I also think that it would be better and simpler to choose the starting location, the direction, and then type the word on the keyboard, rather than placing it tile by tile. It won't help, but it won't probably make things worse to realise that you are joining words by misstake and thus your move is unacceptable for that reason. That's, I think, anyway the hardest part of the game for us: once you found a word to play, making sure that it can be placed somewhere without conflict.
Because of this, I think that it's harder than chess for spatial representation skills needed to play well.

I think being able to type in a word would be easier for some and quicker although i think you will get some situations where the word would bounce because it does not fit but you get used to that, least you can still try again. It would be the same if people don't spell words correctly. A1 to O15 etc is an excellent suggestion and I think that would work well. People can buy a braille scrabble board and they can with chess too if they feel it would be helpful with having both when playing either game.

I didn't think about it with bots but it would be interesting to see what they could come up with. It reminds me once when I was playing scrabble in a school tournament. One of the teachers who was watching commented to another teacher that he spotted a really good word he could make from my letters. quite annoying as they never pointed out to me lol.

I think its a good idea to think about this game as you may come up with other ideas to enhance the game.

I really understand that all this proces is not easy and that there would be many issues to solve. Unfortunately I am not any specialist to be able to help, but I am ready to look for things in Polish if there will be any chance to implement Polish dictionary in maybe comming scrabble. Still waiting for that surprise in a future.

I agree that there are more and less popular games in playroom but even the less played one still has it's fans and for example me personally I often play little exam and enjoy this game a lot. I wish you Aminiel could have this feeling that any of your efforts is ignored or made for nothing. I do appreciate all you have done and are doing for playroom and I am greatfull for playroom it self. I am here so many years, that even this should be strong prove how much I like this platform.

Hello,
another issue with word games in general is translation support.

Here I am speaking as a big fan of The little exam. It is one of my favorite social games, and we try to regularly play it with friends. It is just so much fun, especially when you are also together on a voice chatting platform.

However, since I am not a native English speaker, I usually refrain from playing this kind of game in English because I think that I will usually lack ideas or not know how to express myself very well. This is why I don't create this game and organize it in English, but rather play in my own language with friends. I consider my English decent, but since I don't use it every day, it's very likely that I won't know a spelling of a certain plant, for example, that I would like to write.

Of course, this with playing in our language creates some more difficulties.
We have additional letters that don't exist in English, and the opposite, the letters that exist in English not existing in our language. So we tried to do a kind of improvised replacement of these letters into closest equivalents for our language, but it isn't perfect, and people always have to be reminded about what letter replaces what.
Not to mention, if someone doesn't speak English, they also sometimes have to be reminded about category names and what they mean.

Otherwise though, it's really a great game, and as much as I'm hoping you will get back to wider translations support on the Playroom in general, if not this, why not make an exception for word games?

For example, there could be custom lists people submit for their own languages.
In the case of the little exam, it shouldn't be complicated at all, you just have to submit a list of letters supported in your language, and also a list of categories translated into a language.
Finally, when choosing the difficulty to play, you could have an option at the bottom called other languages, and that is where all these custom, player submitted lists could show up. That would allow more access to this game, and people could play even though they don't have the Playroom translated into their language.

Of course, for Scrabble mentioned above this is more complex, players can't create a language dictionary, so here that wouldn't be possible. My point was more that it's not so much that people don't like word games.

The little exam is also very specific in this term. Even if I was a perfect English speaker, I still wouldn't play it with random people. It requires a certain trust amongst your group of friends. You all should judge fairly, and fair judgment is a subjective thing, so it's best if you know each other and generally agree.

Also, as much as this feature is fun for us, I am not sure why you have added the ability to add or remove more than 2 points. It makes sense, for example, if two people write the same word but spelled differently, the judge might want to remove 1 point, or 2 points if you play under such rules that you agreed on before. However, a judge should never have to remove or add more than that amount, unless there is a possible case I have missed here.

Despite all mentioned above, as I already said, this is still a great social game and very different from the other games we have on the platform, so thanks for the implementation and even if it's not as popular as some other games, that shouldn't discourage you. There are still people who enjoy this game, the biggest enjoyment is socialising, and that is what makes it one of my favorites, even if I don't have nearly as many games played as I do for some others.

Oi,
thanks Aminiel for not dismissing this idea out of hand and for considering to add scrabble in the future. I also think that this would be a great addition to the current list of games and it would definitely be something new again. There are only two word games so far, so expanding this category would definitely add some variety here.
I personally come to RS games solely to play scrabble and I'm quite enjoying it, except that the interface really isn't very good. I don't want to go into too much details, but for instance the naming of columns and rows that you mentioned doesn't exist there at all; if a square is empty, the game just says "blank" and announces the bonus if there'S any, if it contains a letter it would just read it and the value, and that's all. Whenever it's your turn, you are automatically placed in the center of the grid, which is almost never useful. Given all this, I can understand that it could be difficult for some people to get familiar with the board and gameplay, and I believe it could have been done slightly better.
As for adding scrabble here, I'm guessing that it's not the most difficult game to write, the trickiest and most challenging part would be making it international and adding & keeping the different dictionaries up to date. However, even if there were only two dictionaries to begin with, say French and English, I think it would be still worth the effort, and some way of dealing with this problem could be found with time.
I'm also convinced that this game would be much more popular than it might look like, despite language barriers and the challenge of a grid-based gameplay. Granted, like most board games, scrabble requires some imagination and spatial thinking, but I'd say it's overall easier than chess. Maybe it's because I haven't gotten into chess yet, but it seems to me that creating new words is interesting in itself, and it's up to each person to decide how much thought or attention one puts into it, or if just creating words, and discovering new random words (in the case of non-native speakers like me) is enough to make one happy.
And speaking of popularity by the way, I wanna echo the posts above me and I really want to thank you for adding many interesting and unique games, while I wish that the lower popularity of some would not discourage you. They are in fact one of the reasons why playroom really got attached to my heart and why I'll keep coming back. I think I've said something similar in the past so sorry for repeating myself, but thanks to this platform I got into card games which I hadn't paid much attention to before, and I really had fun exploring those games with different people and enjoying this time together. I'm sure that I am not the only one who feels this way. It is seriously one of the main things that make playroom stand high above other games for me. I was playing lots of games before including multiplayers with friends I knew, but no other place had such a strong element of socialization, gaming and spending fun time together. Also, statistics are one thing, but on the other hand, just right now there's a connect 4 tournament going on in the Spanish playroom as part of a big tournament mimicking the olympic games. Oh and after all, the English server also had a very successful tournament in the same game quite recently, we had a French tarot tournament in the past, a couple of 6 takes, etc etc. In short, the fact that a certain game isn't played the most obviously doesn'T mean that it was a failure, and the diversity is really appreciated. Sorry for the big digression.
About typing the words on the keyboard, I definitely agree that this feels much easier and seems like a good idea, perhaps the best approach could be leaving both options possible as someone could prefer the other way for better imagination. Marking the squares from a1 to h8 would be very useful though and indeed seems like the most logical way to me. And regarding the official dictionary vs custom words, native speakers will probably correct me here but I feel like the official dictionary is pretty huge, with many alternate spelling variants and unusual words, it shall not be as much frustrating even if we strictly follow this source.
Sorry for a long post and good luck with the future work.
A-T

You can realistically only have scrabble where you have PRs for those languages, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian and I think Aminiel will have his work cut out even with those languages without having any more problems for now. You forget BG that it is not only the words that are different but the values/numbers of each letter differs quite a bit with all the languages and as already stated words change, you can get away with missing 1 year but 3, 4 or even5 things change quite a bit.

With the little exam things in general stay the same, An Apple, Banana, Cherry etc don't change. I don't know who deducted points from you in the past but people I have played with have not done that to people in those games. I admit I rarely play it these days so things could have changed

Hi,
I haven't talked about anybody personally deducting points, and this topic is anyway not for calling people out.

I have also said that Scrabble is much more complicated to do for more languages.

This would not be a popular game on the playroom.
I always considered it as a game for children who need to improve their vocabulary.
But this is my personal opinion.
It's ok to be played by the adults too, but it won't work on here, because of the language barrier and even some native speakers have issues with their spelling.
I rather would like to see more card games, they are very popular, but this is for another topic.

You can't say that it's a game for children when you know that there are very serious tournaments, qualifications, and championships in different languages, and that thousends of people participate every year (at least it exists for french, English and spanish; I don't know for others).

The big difference, of course, is that when you play for fun, usually you don't use an official dictionary, and maybe you don't count points or only very approximately (I personally have almost never counted points)

Scrabble in the UK is played with people of all ages and factually some of the best players in the world who have played in the English language version have got to the semi-final stages of the World Championships speaking very little English. Apparently they know all the small words from memory I guess. True some people can't spell and that's why if there is a dictionary the computer won't accept their word but will give them a second, third or even more chances to find a correct word. True not everybody will play this game but that is the same for French Tarot and others but they are still worthwhile games to have in the PR. You can say the same that there are many games which are for kids but are enjoyed by people all over the world whatever their age and that is not just in the PR.

The point with the little exam it may say in the official rules that you "can" deduct points for spelling but that is a discretionary rule which I would guess is hardly ever used. There are some games when I win most of the time but some games such as uno where I lose most of the time but the biggest point is to enjoy the games even if I win or lose. Games like the little exam you can learn new things and perhaps do better next time.

Ah, thanks, I learned something new.
I mean, I did not know that there are even championships.

Thanks for implementing such an unpopular game btw, love it!