Do you have a few hours to kill? Then you might want to try your hand at Twitter Scrabble, an app that challenges you to come up with high-scoring tweets.
The game, created by Belgian ad agency Duval Guillaume Modem, is actually designed to promote another game, Mattel’s Scrabble Trickster. However, Twitter Scrabble seems compelling enough on its own. The premise: You are assigned 100 random characters. Then you try to use as many letters as you can in a tweet. When you’re done, you send out a tweet, along with your score. The record so far is 242. Every day, Mattel awards a Scrabble Trickster game to the person with the highest-scoring tweet.
However, it should be noted that the game is deeply flawed. First of all, any combination of letters will work, even if they don’t make sense, which means you can just keep tapping your keyboard until you get to 100 characters. (The app lets you know when the letter you’re pressing isn’t available.) Secondly, it’s in multiple languages, which is great, unless you want to see how you compare to other English speakers.
Still, it’s a great idea to update Scrabble and one that uniquely leverages Twitter’s brevity and reliance on text. After Hasbro’s stumbles with Scrabble in social media (Hasbro handles the title in the U.S. and Canada; Mattel does elsewhere), this seems like promising new territory.
Reps from Hasbro could not be reached for comment on the game. Aficianados may recall that Hasbro created a stir in 2010 when it introduced Trickster after erroneous news accounts claimed that Scrabble would begin accepting proper nouns. Proper nouns are actually acceptable in Trickster, not Scrabble.
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