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New Zealander, Nigel Richards, who speaks no Spanish, has won the Spanish-language world title in Scrabble. Richards, a professional player who holds five English-language world titles, started memorising the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago and beat defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina, whose mother tongue is Spanish. His victory was notable even by his standards, as he had to adjust his gameplay to compensate for different tile values between English and Spanish Scrabble rules, as well as contend with thousands of additional seven, eight, and nine letter words in the Spanish language. Major news: Cheaper energy on the...

"As Daniel says, it’s a spatial game more than a semantic one, which explains why many of the world’s top players hail from Thailand. They concentrate on structures rather than meanings. Indeed, it has been argued that speaking English is a disadvantage in top-flight Scrabble, where the true champion relies on a battery of memorized pseudo-words." All of this explains why, at those lofty levels, the game still contains racial, ethnic and sexual slurs. Now, they're slated to be gone -- even as some players who the slurs are aimed at don't necessarily think they should be expurgated. According to...

Scrabble just got W-O-K-E. Players of the classic board game will no longer be able to rack up points for spelling out racial and ethnic slurs, according to Scrabble officials. A total of 236 bigoted words were removed from the official Scrabble word list used at tournaments — in order to make the game friendlier to all types of people, The North American Scrabble Players Association. said Wednesday. “Removing slurs is the very least that we can do to make our association more inclusive,” NASPA CEO John Chew said in a statement. “How can we in this day tell prospective...

... Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP3tiOGAYuc Couples: Once you take your own Family Media Detox challenge, you may be amazed by how much more time you suddenly have for meaningful time as husband and wife. I don't mean to imply that watching a television program or a movie together is necessarily "wasted time," but in most cases, there are much more fruitful and substantive ways for the two of you to relate to one another. Use this newly-liberated spare time to serve, enjoy, and re-discover your spouse. Virtually every dimension of your marriage can benefit from a radical reduction in entertainment. As you dial down...

The rules of word game Scrabble are being changed for the first time in its history to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said. Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count. Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Bored games BY DAVE BARRY (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published Jan. 26, 1997.) OK, here's a nostalgia question: What childhood game does this remind you of? ''Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick.'' If you answered, ''Spin the Bottle,'' then I frankly do not want to know any more about your childhood. What I'm referring to is, of course, the classic board game ''Clue,'' in which you try to solve a murder by using a logical process of deduction to narrow down the various possibilities until your sister has to go to the bathroom, at which...

This has got to be one of the cleverest E-Mails ever seen. Someone out there either has too much spare time or is deadly at Scrabble. GEORGE BUSH: When you rearrange the letters: HE BUGS GORE DORMITORY: When you rearrange the letters: DIRTY ROOM EVANGELIST: When you rearrange the letters: EVIL'S AGENT PRESBYTERIAN: When you rearrange the letters: BEST IN PRAYER DESPERATION: When you rearrange the letters: A ROPE ENDS IT THE MORSE CODE: When you rearrange the letters: HERE COME DOTS SLOT MACHINES: When you rearrange the letters: CASH LOST IN ME ANIMOSITY: When you rearrange the letters: IS...