| [ | Date | | | 2024-03-03 00:40 -0500 | ] |
| [ | Mod. | | | 2024-03-11 22:29 -0400 | ] |
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Ever since I’ve heard of the game “Scrabble Junior” in the early 1990s, it seemed like a rather bad game to me, profiting off the well-known brand Scrabble. As far as I could remember from then, one side of the board would be a game with words already printed, and players would have to cover the words with identical letter tiles. The other side of the board would be blank, with perhaps simplified rules compared to regular Scrabble.
I recently acquired a North-American French language version of Scrabble Junior.
Rules for the “step 1” game are (summarized and approximate, mostly to highlight the differences with regular Scrabble):
On their turn, each player moves as many letter tiles as they can, up to two, to matching spots on the board. In some versions, if playing is impossible, the player uses their turn to swap some of their tiles with the same number from the tile bag.
Depending on versions of the game, writing words in order; from first to last letter, may or may be mandatory.
Completing a word gives the player one point. (In some versions, each player picks a color at game start, and completing a word of that color gives an extra point.)
When all words have been covered, the game is over. The winner is the person who has accumulated the most points.
Rules for “step 2” game, using the blank side, are mostly the same as for regular Scrabble, but “bonus” location computations are simpler, using only addition (this probably depends on versions).
There are multiple issues with the “step 1” game:
As the game progresses, it becomes more and more boring, since the only allowed moves are to play on available, pre-set locations, and their number dwindle. I believe it is possible for all players to be unable to play any letter, while locations are still available. This forced us to introduce a house rule: discard (remove from the game) any letter tiles that are not available on the board anymore.
In the French version I got, not all letters of the alphabet are printed on the board1. It is therefore possible, even on the first turn, to pick a tile that will never be playable.
Weirdly (to me, indicating that the game must not have been tested very thoroughly), some pre-printed “letters” on the board are unavailable as tiles (Q / U / QU). This makes the game impossible to complete in all cases.
The missing alphabet letter is presumably not an issue because a combined “QU” tile exists.
The missing letters make the game frustrating to play for players who were unlucky enough to pick one of the missing letters.
Many letters are missing from the printed board. This makes the game frustrating. An additional weirdness is that the qord “requin” appears on the board, using six tile locations, whereas there is no available “Q” tile; but just a combined “QU” tile: this makes the game impossible to complete.
My guess is that this is the result of a hasty translation from the US / Canada English version, including some of the drawings (at least the words for “ladybug” and “elephant” are present in both versions), without proper attention paid to such details as making the game enjoyable.
I would have returned the game as defective, but it came from a small local shop, and I would rather not cost them money for an issue they didn’t cause.
More precisely, not all letters or letter combinations that exist as tiles are printed on the board.↩︎
Quick links:
David Haguenauer
<www@kurokatta.org>
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