One week ago, my father came up with an idea to "level the playing field" with Scrabble. Instead of each player receiving their own hand of tiles, there is a community hand of seven tiles. Instead of each player having their own turn, you play in "rounds", where everyone has to come up with the best word and placement and then everyone submits their word. Each player earns the points for their submitted word and the highest-scoring word goes on the board. I dubbed this "Socialist Scrabble".
This past Saturday, my adventurous friends Jim, Fidel and Dick decided to pilot the experience. As I explained the rules, Fidel and Jim started accusing me of "vaporware", especially after I admitted that we had never played this variation before. Once we settled that debate and got into actual gaming, we found that there are a lot of rules still to be ironed out. For instance, what if two people submit the same word or there are 2+ words that tie for highest-scoring word? Who gets to pick out the tiles each turn - the person with the highest score or the one whose word was just placed on the board?
I'd love to get feedback from you - the community - to see how you would address these and other potential challenges. Do you think this could be a feasible Scrabble variation with a bit of tweaking?