Thanks for posting. I've been a user of the Internet Scrabble Club for over 15 years now. I came to it after learning of competitive scrabble from reading Word Freak by Stephan Fatsis [1].
I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time, and significantly more than that during peak hours.
Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4 dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling community of word enthusiasts.
An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger pun here.]
Competitive scrabble certainly isn't helped by the fact that, unlike other relatively mainstream games such as chess, it's jointly owned by Mattel and Hasbro.
yeah, that is without doubt the biggest millstone around scrabble's neck. the community could have done a lot more were it able to freely develop the game and surrounding activities.
Probably Mattel/Hasbro and trademark/copyright issues.
Official mobile games have to be ruined by aggressive monetisation and scammy in-app ads, it seems.
Words With Friends got away with a making A Scrabble clone by using a slightly different board layout and dictionary. But they eventually transformed that into a very annoying experience overloaded with the usual F2P clutter.
WordFeud seems to be the recommended mobile Scrabble clone these days.
I play Wordfeud almost every day, and it is the best 3$ (I think it was 3$ at the time I paid for it years ago, not sure what it costs now) I ever spent on an app.
So how does Wordfeud get around copyright issues with Hasbro? Do they pay them a royalty?
It’s $6 now. And I’m happy to pay it. The official scrabble app is a horrible testament to psychotic UI’s being passed off as “normal”. I swear to god, it’s like living in a clockwork orange. I just want to play the game but there are chests and gemstones and adds you can watch and unlocks mid game and on and on…
It is just nuts. I installed a mobile game couple of days ago, liked it. Paid 4.99 to "remove ads" without realizing that it only removed some ads. They got me. I uninstalled it, 5$ down the toilet.
I understand game makers need to pay rent too, that is why I spent that 5$ to support them. But they treated their customer (me) like shit, lost me forever. Good job guys
This insatiable greed to make more and more and more money...Yikes
So far, Wordfeud hasn't done anything crappy like this. I hope they stay that way
I just played 2 games on wordfeud and wow it is both amazing and sad how little I need to be satisfied and how hard it is to find such an app. Anyways, I uninstalled scrabble and am invested in this one.
Not that I know of. The wikipedia article on ISC.ro [1] gives the handle (i.e., username) on the owner of the site, "Carol". I will say that migration to a browser-based interface has helped. It's now possible to play on a smart phone, albeit a bit awkward, with a small input line for commands.
Speaking to an earlier point, the domain of ".ro" may reflect a reality of who has licensing of Scrabble in Romania, and also outside of the U.S. and U.K. I'm not up to date on all of that.
I had a background playing internet chess. I started with yahoo and gravitated towards lightning (1/0 time controls). I think there's more than a grain of truth to the quotation, "I play way too much blitz chess. It rots the brain just as surely as alcohol." ~ attributed to Nigel Short, English grandmaster. Fast-paced board games that deliver rewards are addictive.
As a student of neurotransmitters, I can attest that playing blitz chess or scrabble does result in dopamine hits. Particular to Scrabble, one can receive such a hit of dopamine from a bingo (50 point bonus for playing all seven tiles). In a three minute (or less) time control, a medium to expert player can look forward to an average of two of these per game. All that's missing from this slot machine is the lights and sounds.
Isc.ro is a unique little corner of the internet. It's navigated away from a downloaded console to a browser. It has its fair share of persistent trolls. There's a chat room, channel 20, that used to regularly have over 100 members active at any given time, and significantly more than that during peak hours.
Competitive scrabble as a community peaked, IMO, in 2004 with the nationals in New Orleans. There's a Sports Illustrated article chronicling its subsequent problems [2]. NASPA in particular is undemocratic in its governance and pushed a woke agenda during the pandemic, resulting in the removal of hundreds of words from the official lexicons. The net result is there are now at least 4 dictionaries, fracturing an already small and arguably dwindling community of word enthusiasts.
An alternative to NASPA in the competitive Scrabble tournament and club scene is WGPO [3]. My personal experience is that most mid-size cities have clubs, and you'll meet worthwhile people in them. I liked to say, at a Scrabble club I always felt comfortable that I was typically not the most nor the least odd fellow there but rather squarely in the middle of the pack.
I've noticed a pattern at the Internet Scrabble Club that I also noticed at the Free Internet Chess Server (fics.org), where I migrated after Yahoo games was phased out: a loss of members. ISC now competes with numerous viable alternatives easily accessible from a smartphone. In its heyday, it was unique place where you could navigate the interface with telnet commands. [Insert finger pun here.]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Freak [2] https://www.si.com/more-sports/2020/10/26/how-scrabble-blew-... [3] https://wordgameplayers.org/
Edited: for grammar and clarity.