So my asian friend told me the other day that there was no such thing as Scrabble in Taiwan. I wasn't surprised. But then I remembered that Chinese characters were made from a set of standard brush strokes.
In this game, you would receive a bunch of brush strokes, which you would then arrange into words and place upon the playing surface. The first player would form a word in the middle of the board. The next player would then have to use a brush stroke on the board to form part of his word.
I don't know much about Asian languages, so I'm not sure if this would work.-- Cuit_au_Four, Aug 18 2005 Parts is parts http://www.uoregon....d/cjkdictframes.htm214 standard radicals, good starting point [lurch, Aug 20 2005] I think it could work. Some word are even combinations of other words, so you could even build on what's already there.-- 5th Earth, Aug 18 2005 It would probably not be much like scrabble, but it sounds like a workable premise for a game.-- wagster, Aug 18 2005 More like the game Upwords. Good stuff.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Aug 20 2005 Nice idea. Have you figured out how to handle the blanks? I dont think it will work to have a fully transparent piece laid over the rest.-- energy guy, Aug 20 2005 This would probably only work with a few Chinese characters, for example the ideograms for the numbers one to three, unless the phonetic and the radical were used rather than individual strokes. This doesn't work at all for Japanese kana, Korean script or the various South Asian-based scripts, but for some of these conventional scrabble might work. Another thing that might work is to use Chinese proverbs instead of words with coinciding words instead of letters.-- nineteenthly, Aug 20 2005 [nineteenthly] is quite correct, as there is a nicely defined square area in which your completed character needs to be centered and balanced, with strokes placed in combinations related to each other. However, if you don't mind a layer of electronics, your playing piece can float its ideogram into the ones represented by the ones underneath and display the properly formed compound character.
Only valid characters permitted, but there's a bonus for high stroke counts.-- lurch, Aug 20 2005 sp: sclabberu.-- ConsulFlaminicus, Aug 22 2005 I like this, good points in the annos too.-- dentworth, Aug 22 2005 //no such thing as Scrabble in Taiwan// They do have crosswords, however. Except instead of words they use proverbs and sayings.-- spacemoggy, Aug 23 2005 When I was teaching English in China, it was a common sight to see people sitting around tables along the pavement, playing Chinese Chess or Mahjong. One day, a few of the other teachers and I took a table down to the street, and sat around it playing Scrabble. We attracted quite a bit of interest as bemused locals gathered round to watch us, asking "Jaega meiguo mahjong ma?" ("Is this American Mahjong?").-- imaginality, Apr 29 2007 You could use a projector with transparencies that can be slid to different distances (to change the size of the projected image). This lets you fit your stroke on top of the picture regardless of the needed scaling.-- phundug, Apr 30 2007 /Chinese proverbs/
This idea already had my bun, but I love the poverbs idea. These should be a rule governing a proverb, and proverb components could be rearranged. This would be fun in english too.-- bungston, Apr 30 2007 // Chinese proverbs //
"Dammit, all I have is moons."-- phundug, May 01 2007 random, halfbakery