Fox News Is Losing Its Mind Over the New “Woke” Scrabble. I Actually Played It. Guess What?!
Well, that’s it: They made Scrabble woke. Conservative news outlets have been making a meal the past few days of the news that Mattel is introducing “Scrabble Together,” a cooperative variation on the classic word-making game designed to be more “accessible” and “inclusive” for younger players. “Mattel Creates Scrabble Without Scoring for Gen Z,” declared Newsmax. “Scrabble is dumbing itself down for the woke,” Jeanine Pirro proclaimed on Fox News, over a chyron reading “SCRABBLE FOR SNOWFLAKES.” Even the New York Times ran a piece claiming, “Will Classic Scrabble devotees object? You bet”—although the only actual competitive Scrabble player quoted in the piece sees “nothing wrong with allowing non-word people to have more fun with the game.”
While it seemed possible to me that Mattel had dumbed down Scrabble for the benefit of phone-addicted, oversensitive Zoomers, I thought I should try it out before I reached any firm conclusions. Having now played Scrabble Together—Mattel shipped me a sample—it turns out that it is a perfectly fun variation on Scrabble that might indeed appeal to some young players, and probably does not presage the end of Western civilization.
I sat down to play Scrabble Together with my teenage daughter, an actual Gen Z person who had not played Scrabble before, and my wife, a person my age who is so good at Scrabble due to playing the app that I refuse to compete with her anymore. Scrabble Together uses the same tiles and a similar board as traditional Scrabble, but the game works cooperatively rather than competitively: Instead of scoring points for each word and trying to defeat the other players, you’re working together with them to achieve goals. If you can succeed at all 20 goals without getting stuck, you all win; if not, you all lose.
We began on a pretty good roll, knocking out a bunch of simple goals (“Play a three-letter word,” “Play a word containing at least two different vowels”). When it’s your turn, you play a word as you ordinarily would in Scrabble—but it must fulfill the task on one of the Goal Cards face up on the table. Instead of scoring your word, you turn over the goal card you’ve accomplished and everyone says, “Great job, Dan.”
Eventually, as sometimes happens in Scrabble, I ended up with a rack full of consonants, which made fulfilling any of the goals impossible. For such moments, the game offers six “Helper Cards,” “little powerups,” as the rule sheet describes them, which give a player a momentary assist. Mine allowed me to draw an extra tile, which thankfully was a vowel, so I played a word and we moved along.
My daughter asked why I needed her to play this game for work. “Supposedly it’s being marketed to Gen Z, because it’s less competitive and more cooperative,” I said, and she delivered an eye-roll that would have not seemed out of place on the face of Gen X heroine Janeane Garofalo. “I don’t think that’s Gen Z,” she said. “I just think that’s something people like.” And indeed, she’s right that cooperative games—despite the claims of Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld that “playing a game without scoring is anti-human”—are in fact very popular these days with players of all ages. Even the most popular competitive board game of the past few years, Wingspan, doesn’t feel particularly cut-throat, and rewards players for taking actions that help everyone at the table. As Wingspan really is about “enjoying your birds,” as its creator, Elizabeth Hargrave, told me, Scrabble Together is really about enjoying your words.
Despite being not a member of Gen Z, I had a good time cooperating with my family to succeed at these various word-making tasks. I wouldn’t say Scrabble Together is that hard—we only really got stuck right at the end when our final Goal Card required me to build a seven-letter word, but then I drew a Helper Card that allowed me to trade letters with someone else, and that solved that. It’s easy to come up with ways to make the game more challenging if you want: increase the number of Goal Cards, say, or even impose a minimum score for each play. I don’t see the lack of scorekeeping in Scrabble Together as a problem. Where traditional Scrabble demands that you play just the right words in just the right places to maximize points, Scrabble Together really encourages you to just play whatever word works as soon as you think of it. That cuts down on a lot of boring waiting around for one player (me) to work out the perfect way to use that triple-letter score. One pleasant result: Our game only took about 20 minutes.
What is it about Scrabble Together that so annoys the right wing? The “wokeness” claim, for example, makes no sense: On Fox News, Pirro seemed very focused on various additions and deletions from the official Scrabble word list, which mostly affect competitive tournament players and have nothing to do with Scrabble Together. (Indeed, Scrabble Together is not even being sold in the U.S., only in Europe and other territories, since it’s not Mattel that possesses the North American license but Hasbro.) The real issue with the game is that it feeds their belief that Gen Zers are soft, weak “snowflakes” who need everything handed to them on a platter. They could never handle real Scrabble, they say—they barely know how to look up from their phones!
Instead, I think it’s pretty likely that Scrabble Together—rather than somehow endangering “real” Scrabble—will serve as the gateway for young people that Mattel hopes it will. They’ll master the relatively easy Scrabble Together, and then be inspired to try out Classic Scrabble. (Great news: Not only is Mattel not incinerating every copy of the regular game while dancing around the bonfire chanting they/them pronouns, they’re printing Classic Scrabble right on the other side of Scrabble Together’s board!) After all, the board game market is blowing up across age groups, though it can be hard to convince any young person that the games of her parents are worth her while. “Scrabble’s pretty old,” my daughter pointed out. “I’m sure it was fun when it was brand new, and people were like, ‘Oh my God, Scrabble,’ in the 1900s or whatever.” Did I wither away into a husk upon hearing these words? Yes. But was I happy to have played Scrabble with my teenager for the first time ever? I sure was.
