NOTE: VERY WIP
I made an idea of creating a Scrabble variant that uses the exact same rules except for the word validity, called "Crabble". The name is derived by removing the first letter of "Scrabble". It is inspired by the Scrabble variant called "Clabbers", where you can play the anagrams of valid words.
The only key difference of the Crabble rules is that words played can be either a real word or a partial pattern of the real word. For example, ECEDENT is a valid play in Crabble because it is a partial pattern of the real word PRECEDENT. Similarly, given your rack of AEILNTU, while you can play ALUNITE in the regular Scrabble, you can also play its anagram UANTILE in Crabble as well since it takes a front Q hook to form a real word QUANTILE. On the other hand, a small handful of short words like JQ and III and are unacceptable, since there are no words in the entire Scrabble dictionary that have these patterns in them.
This also increases the ability to hook to pre-existing words for additional points, increasing opportunities for high-scoring seven-letter bingo plays. It also features in a numerous high-scoring consonant-heavy parallel plays as well, further increasing scoring opportunities with consonant-heavy racks. For example, the two-letter word CK, while it is not valid in the regular Scrabble, it's valid in Crabble because there are a tons of words that have the CK combination next to each other, known as the "digraph", and you can also take multiple consecutive hooks to CK, with a healthy dose of long words to choose from (e.g. CK hooked four consecutive times to make JACKET). Similarly, the two-letter word HY is also valid in Crabble as there are also thousands of words in the entire English-language Scrabble dictionaries. In the North American lexicon (NWL), HY takes four unique "real word" hooks, the front S, T, and W hooks onto SHY, THY, and WHY, respectively, as well as the back P hook onto HYP.
It is also worth noting that there are way more valid two-letter words in Crabble than the existing variant Clabbers. For instance, the H not only makes 10 two-letter words that are valid in the regular Scrabble (AH, EH, HA, HE, HI, HM, HO, OH, SH, and UH) and 4 additional two-letter words that are valid in Clabbers (HS, HU, IH, and MH), but also makes many more two-letter words with other consonants and vowels, including CH, GH, HY, KH, NH, PH, RH, TH, WH, XH, and even ZH (found in the words CAZH, NUDZH, QUINZHEE, PIROZHOK (pl. PIROZHKI), and MUZHIK).
UPDATE 12/19/2025: There is one big catch to this variant of Scrabble - the double word score at the center square for opening plays is replaced with the triple word score. This catch increases the opening play's score to justify the average non-bingo score of the subsequent turns (~60 points).
There is a critical thing to consider related to the number of valid words in Crabble. In the NWL2023 lexicon, there are 196,601 words in total. When we count the number of words per length (from 2 to 15 letter word) clearly, there are:
2s: 107
3s: 1,085
4s: 4,247
5s: 9,476
6s: 16,706
7s: 25,473
8s: 31,736
9s: 31,229
10s: 25,028
11s: 18,735
12s: 13,515
13s: 9,323
14s: 6,102
15s: 3,839
So, what we can calculate the maximum number of sequences of valid words in the entire NWL2023 lexicon, including duplicates, we can use the formula as follows:
Number of sequence by specific length = Σ(valid words of the exact length + (sequence from longer words by additional letters in length × (1 + number of additional letters in length)))
So we can estimate the raw maximum as:
2s: 676
3s: 17,576
4s: 456,976
5s: 978,985
6s: 787,823
7s: 606,137
8s: 441,157
9s: 301,650
10s: 193,879
11s: 117,337
12s: 65,823
13s: 33,044
14s: 13,780
15s: 3,839
So, the estimated raw maximum number of valid patterns in Crabble is around 4,000,000 patterns. The actual number must be significantly lower than the raw maximum due to numerous duplicates, presumably around 1,600,000 valid patterns due to the fact that longer words generally inherit roots from shorter words.
UPDATE: After taking a couple of hours to create the complete list of 2-15 letter sequences using the NWL lexicon, the final result is:
Total: 1,166,659 words
2s: 598 words
3s: 7,357 words
4s: 44,170 words
5s: 118,566 words
6s: 180,099 words
7s: 202,613 words
8s: 188,209 words
9s: 148,362 words
10s: 111,847 words
11s: 76,348 words
12s: 48,112 words
13s: 23,960 words
14s: 12,579 words
15s: 3,839 words
Note that the final numbers are not 100% accurate.
The strategy in Crabble is pretty much similar to the existing Clabbers variant, but with some key differences, including vowel-independent parallel plays, much higher average score, stronger "power" JQXZ tiles for easy 70+ point non-bingo plays, far more complicated strategy on playing defense.
See the old example games here.
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