U.S. players react to news that new Scrabble version will allow proper nouns

(Michael Temchine)

"I think it's an April Fools' joke," said Chris Cree, a forklift wholesaler in Dallas who is co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association. "I thought I was reading the Onion."

Others reacted with panic or scorn. Sample Scrabble tweets:

"How pusillanimous! Scrabble rules to allow proper nouns to encourage younger players."

"The game of Scrabble shall allow proper nouns, greatly increasing the popularity of Mr. Sarkozy & all the towns of Wales."

The story was no April Fools' joke, but the way it was being passed around wasn't exactly true, either.

"We're not burying the standard game at all," says Philip Nelkon, promotions manager of Mattel. "It's been around for 60 years, and we wouldn't do anything to affect the crown jewels."

Instead, Mattel plans to introduce something called Scrabble Trickster. There will be squares on the board calling on players to draw cards. The cards might instruct you to forfeit a letter to an opponent -- or permit you to spell a proper noun.

"The idea is to be a little bit more accessible," Nelkon says.

How nice -- but how irrelevant to an American Scrabble player. Because, frankly, who cares about Mattel's plans for Scrabble? Mattel controls Scrabble only outside the United States and Canada. Here, Hasbro is the maker and marketer of Scrabble. And Hasbro has no plans to introduce a version with new rules, a spokesman said. Scrabble Trickster will not be sold in the United States.

So, for the American Scrabble community, the story is . . . no story.

The collective freakout was nevertheless instructive. It said something about the nature of a classic.

"Anytime something like this happens, people go crazy because they have an unbelievable sense of ownership over Scrabble and its piece of American culture," says John D. Williams Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association, based on Long Island.

Scrabble was created during the Depression by Alfred Butts, an unemployed architect. He sold the rights to entrepreneur James Brunot. The game caught on in the 1950s, and a series of toy manufacturers got involved. Today there are an estimated 50 million leisure Scrabble players and thousands of serious tournament players in the United States.

"At the highest levels, Scrabble is a perfect intellectually challenging game of strategy and geometry and math and the English language," says Fatsis, a freelance journalist and author of the 2001 book "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players." "You don't need to change anything because Alfred Butts got it right, this perfect balance between risk and reward, between luck and skill."

Fatsis has started Scrabble clubs at a couple of elementary schools and a middle school in Washington. This weekend, Coach Fatsis is leading a dozen of his young Scrabble mavens to Orlando for the eighth annual National School Scrabble Championship.

"They will not," says Fatsis, "be using proper nouns."