For years, there has been a set of rules available from the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, where they have actually been holding competitions, and an online setup for play at a distance, but recently I noticed that an officially licensed version has come out from a company called Tinderbox, with instructions in Latin. I spent some $55 to have a copy of the official game sent to me from England.
Now, I am happy with my purchase, but I happen to be a collector of games in addition to being a Latin enthusiast. But I thought I would make a few remarks that might be useful for others of a different bent but who might like to posses such a game for one reason or another.
First, the box is solid and looks good. The board is solid and looks very nice. The letter trays are as you might expect, and then there are the tiles. I had hoped that they would be interchangeable with the cheaply available tiles from an English-language set, but these seem to be where some cost-cutting was done. I don’t have an English set with me, but these for Latin seem to be cheaper in manufacture. Most of the individual tiles that don’t have actual defects seem fine, though thicker than what I’m used to. All of them are clearly stamped and appropriately glazed. But they’re not quite uniform in dimension. It’s not a big deal, except that I did expect that an officially licensed version that cost a lot of money would be at least comparable in quality to the version I can buy for ten bucks at my grocery store. Again, not a big deal in play unless you have the kind of friend who can not only play Scrabble in Latin, but can actually take advantage of data gathered from looking at the uneven-ness of the tiles on your bench. The person who can do all that will have other advantages in preparedness that will make this trivial.
The board itself is in Latin:
[ul]
[li]Double Letter Score = Pretium Duplex Litterae[/li][li]Triple Letter Score = Pretium Triplex Litterae[/li][li]Double Word Score = Pretium Duplex Verbī[/li][li]Triple Word Score = Pretium Triplex Verbī[/li][/ul]
The officially licensed version has a different letter distribution from the University of Toronto version.
The University of Toronto Lūdus Scrabulārum, based on the first book of the Aeneid:
[ul]
[li]0 points: Blank x2[/li][li]1 point: E ×12, A ×9, I ×9, V ×9, S ×8, T ×8, R ×7, O ×5[/li][li]2 points: C ×4, M ×4, N ×4, D ×3, L ×3[/li][li]3 points: Q ×3[/li][li]4 points: B ×2, G ×2, P ×2, X ×2[/li][li]8 points: F ×1, H ×1[/li][/ul]
Scrabble in Linguā Latīnā, made “in conjunction with scholars from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere, together with the Cambridge Schools Classics Project”.
[ul]
[li]0 points: Blank x2[/li][li]1 point: E ×11, A ×9, I ×11, N ×6, R ×9, S ×8, T ×7, U ×7[/li][li]2 points: C ×4, M ×5, O ×5[/li][li]3 points: D ×3[/li][li]4 points: L ×2, P ×2[/li][li]5 points: B ×2, V ×2[/li][li]6 points: F ×1, G ×1, X x1[/li][li]10 points: H ×1, Q ×1[/li][/ul]
For the sake of comparison, here is the English distribution:
[ul]
[li]0 points: Blank x2[/li][li]1 point: E ×12, A ×9, I ×9, O ×8, N ×6, R ×6, T ×6, L ×4, S ×4, U ×4[/li][li]2 points: D ×4, G ×3[/li][li]3 points: B ×2, C ×2, M ×2, P ×2[/li][li]4 points: F ×2, H ×2, V ×2, W ×2, Y ×2[/li][li]5 points: K ×1[/li][li]8 points: J ×1, X ×1[/li][li]10 points: Q ×1, Z ×1[/li][/ul]
I’m not an expert on the game, but a couple of things I note:
[ul]
[li]The Tinderbox distribution distinguishes U from V, with the semi-vocalic V scoring five times the points. This could be interesting in play, but I have my suspicions that this distribution has not actually been playtested, because of my next point:[/li][li]Ten points for Q! Merry Christmas to you, too, Tinderbox. Granted, Q in latin is still yoked to U as in English – but there are so many more ways to use QU in Latin than in English. Even if you disallow Latin’s vast number of QU-pronouns, which the rules do not, whoever picks out the one Q from the bag can pretty much sit on it without risking much, confident that it will pay off big later on. Am I wrong?[/li][li]And of course, the University of Toronto does in fact run Latin Scrabble tournaments, so I think that distribution at least is getting plenty of play-testing.[/li][li]The letter values are given in Roman numerals on the Tinderbox tiles. I myself don’t set a lot of store by Roman numerals, but it’s a cute touch.[/li][/ul]
I myself take an interest in how to render modern gaming terms in Latin, though here there are no surprises in terminology:
[ul]
[li]Alveolus - board[/li][li]Tesseris - tile (a bit of a problem if you have a game that uses both tiles and dice, but here quite appropriate)[/li][li]Pretia - point value of a letter[/li][li]Summa - player’s total score[/li][li]Summās subdūcere - to figure out the scores (subdūcere can be used for “balancing the books”)[/li][li]Loculamentum - a letter rack (literally “that which functions as a little location”)[/li][li]Quadrata - square[/li][/ul]
The Toronto version treats Lewis & Short as its official dictionary. The Tinderbox version has an online word checker which can also be loaded onto a portable device. Neither allows for enclitics except for those combinations that are common enough to merit their own dictionary entries.
Overall, while it’s nice to have the board and box for the licensed version of Latin Scrabble, it’s probably not worth half a century if you’re just interested in actually playing. If you wanted to just buy cheap English copies of the game and cobble the tiles together into one of the given distributions, you’d have to buy two copies for the Tinderbox distribution. For the Toronto version you’d need three copies just to get enough Q’s, or 4 to get enough V’s, though of course if you’re willing to treat V and U as interchangable, and convert a blank tile to a Q, then you could get by with 2 sets. In either case, there’s no way around having to re-score most of the tiles using a fine-point marker.
The guy running the program at the University of Toronto sells nice looking plastic sets with their distribution for $25 (Canadian?).