A Family Favourite Could Be Changed Forever: Scrabble Players Demand Changes

It looks like even traditional board games like Scrabble have to move with the times.

This might be news for Scrabble-lovers, but the values of the letters could be changed soon.

The letter values on the word board game were assigned according to the front page of a US newspaper in the 1930s. Many believe it is time the scoring system was updated to reflect today’s usage.

All Scrabble players know that Q and Z are the highest scoring tiles. You can get a whopping 10 points for each, in the English language version of the game.

But according to one American researcher, Z really only really deserves six points.

And it's not just the alphabet’s last letter that's under fire.

After 75 years of Scrabble, some argue that the current tile values are out of date as certain letters have become more common than they used to be.

"The dictionary of legal words in Scrabble has changed," says Joshua Lewis, researcher and creator of a software programme which allocates new, up-to-date values to Scrabble tiles.

"Among the notable additions are all of these short words which make it easier to play Z, Q and X, so even though Q and Z are the highest value letters in Scrabble, they are now much easier to play."

Players of the cult game Scrabble are pitching big changes.

Joshua Lewis's programme is called Valett and it recalculates the letter valuations by looking at three main things.

First, the frequency of the letters in the English language, second, the frequency by word length, how many times a letter appears in two, three, seven, and eight-letter words…

And finally, he looked at how easy it is to play the letter with other letters. For example, Q is a difficult letter to play so would warrant a higher score than S, which can be played with many more.

According to Lewis's system, X (worth eight points in the current game) is worth only five points and Z (worth 10 points now) is worth six points.

Not all letters change under these proposals but those that do tend to fall in value.

But Lewis isn’t the first to put forward such a notion. John Chew is co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association and says he hears from people about once or twice a year debating the tile values.

But Mattel is the company that manufactures Scrabble in Europe. Their answer as to if the values can be changed? No.

"Mattel has no plans to change Scrabble tiles. It is not a game where fairness is paramount, it is a game of luck and changing the tile values wouldn't achieve anything," says Philip Nelkon, Scrabble's UK representative.

Scrabble-players, you can breathe a sigh of relief…