zlacker

IMO scrabble would be improved by a similar limitation. There's too many nonsense words.

>>groggo+(OP)
Scrabble is a competitive game, not a puzzle, and therefore subject to a different set of constraints. (Players in a competitive game are trying to win; a puzzle author, if they're any good at their job, is ultimately trying to lose.)

In particular, you have to consider the equilibrium. If you only allow a subset of words in Scrabble, this replaces the competitive advantage from knowing lots of words that no one uses in real life, with a competitive advantage from knowing the exact contours of the border between acceptable and unacceptable words. I would argue that this is even worse; at least if you learn lots of Scrabble words you're learning something about the real world.

By contrast, Wordle can self-impose whatever constraints they want on solutions, and people don't have to know what those constraints are in order to solve the puzzle. (It can help a little on the margin, which in a perfect world would not be the case, but it's much less of a problem for the puzzle-solving experience than the Scrabble equivalent would be.)

>>amelia+G3
Ya that's a good point for competitive scrabble. However today I think a lot of people's main exposure to Scrabble comes from WordsWithFriends (and recently, the new NYT games version). In those games, there's no penalty for getting a wrong word, it just won't let you play it. In that context, I at least think it would be nice to have a setting with a more limited list... it could be like Chess timed variants.

It's obviously an impossible challenge to draw those contours in language. Wordle did pretty well though! And going the other direction, just allowing everything that could possibly a word, just starts getting ridiculous.

>>amelia+G3
Will Anderson has an excellent Scrabble related channel on YouTube, would recommend to anyone who is interested

>>groggo+(OP)
Wouldn’t that make Scrabble only harder and more annoying to play? With that limitation you’ll get situations where you play a perfectly valid word, but it gets rejected because it’s not in the list of approved words. To get good at that version of the game, you’ll have to study the Scrabble word list instead of the dictionary.

With Wordle the limitation is only put on the words the game generates as answers. You can use obscure words to guess, they just won’t be the answer.

>>wartij+0w
this is already the case with scrabble; there is a strictly defined scrabble word list that determines whether a word is acceptable or not, and it often leaves out words that you might find in some other dictionary that is not the official scrabble one (collins for most of the world, or a custom dictionary for american scrabble)

>>groggo+96
Even in casual Scrabble-like games, I expect using a restricted set of words would create a lot of "come on, that's totally a real word, why can't I use it" moments. Most people know at least a few uncommon words that most other people don't (because it's different words for each person).

The Wordle list of legal guesses is not substantially curated; AFAIK basically all five-letter words legal in Scrabble are on it (except on offensiveness grounds, which was a highly controversial decision). If this were not the case, I predict you'd get user dissatisfaction as per above. Wordle's list of possible answers is much more curated, but that's my point; it can err on the side of conservatism, because users won't notice if a word that they'd expect to be on there is missing, whereas they will notice if such a word is not allowed as a guess.

>>zem+TD
Ah ok. Shows what I know about Scrabble.