Emotional Scrabble

Playing 'P-U-M-P-K-I-N' on Thanksgiving Day

I love the idea behind Scrabble; little tiles, each with a letter, that one combines on the board into words.  But what about the scoring; is it as perfect as the game's components?

Here, I'm not questioning whether a 'Y' should in fact be a 4-pointer, while a 'U' is a mere 1-pointer.  No, I'm talking about the quality of play.  

Sometimes a player will get rid of a 'V' by making a word like 'van' and another player might then grunt out 'un huh'; so, no big deal.  But other times, if someone looks at her seven tiles, thinks for a minute or two, and comes up with something that's so appropriate for the occasion that everyone playing is astonished, one hears "wow", "fantastic", "way to go"; like making 'H-A-P-P-Y' on someone's birthday.  Shouldn't there be a reward for that kind of genius?

Tinkering with Scrabble is common; there are oodles of variants that people have come up with that are easily googled.  The obvious change, to diminish some of the frustration in the game, is to set up 3-4 face-down tiles off to the side of the board that any player can access, prior to taking a turn.  Just trade a tile on your rack for a face-down tile in what could be called the 'boneyard'.  So, if you've got three 'I's or two 'U's, trade one in and see what you get; then make your move.

Taking another step into the alternative Scrabble universe, software could be developed that combs through millions of created words (those found on Facebook's Words-With-Friends or Scrabble, for example) and ranks these by rarity, by how many letters in the word, and by how easy a word is to create.  So, words like "red" or "at" wouldn't earn any points, while something like "blue", "afar" or "religion" would earn quite a bit.

Of course to actually align scoring with the quality of a given word one would also have to know the date, the life circumstances for each player, and the news of the day.  And that can only be done by those playing the game, unless..., sometime in the future, our devices know us better than they do at present.

If players are asked to somehow reward each other's words, the problem is, obviously, that points are being given to one's opponent.  So how to make it work?  One way might be for players to guess what value their opponent will assign.  I'll work on this and add an update sometime next year.

Update 1/26/20: Well, nearly four years later and here's one idea:  As mentioned above, the player creating a word secretly guesses one number of bonus points, while opponents guess another.  
  *If the scoring player guesses the same number as the opponent, s/he receives that number of extra points (no guesses of '0' allowed). 
  *If an opponent's guess is one more or less than the scorer, s/he gains a point (no guesses of '0' allowed).
  *If an opponent's guess is more than three points greater than the scoring player, the scorer gains a point.