I’m looking for a copy of Icelandic Scrabble which I want to mail-order either online or over the phone. I can pay by credit card or PayPal. Unfortunately, the only Icelandic board game retailer I’ve found online, http://www.spilavinir.net/, is out of stock, and they tell me it could be months before they get any more. (If their website says it’s in stock, ignore that; it’s a glitch. I called them myself.) I also checked eBay but didn’t have any luck.
Anyone know where else I can get a copy mailed to me, preferably new?
Edited to add: I tried some local games shops and foreign-language bookstores to see if they could order it, but they all told me the same thing. Example:
Yes, it does, which is why I can’t just buy some other Scandinavian-language Scrabble game and pretend it’s Icelandic! The game needs to have the following letters: A Á B D Ð E É F G H I Í J K L M N O Ó P R S T U Ú V X Y Ý Þ Æ Ö
You could do what we did when we made an Esperanto-language version: make our own tiles according to the different letter distribution. But buying the official version is cooler.
I’ve been learning Icelandic at UCL for the past year. (It’s a bit slow going, though; there are only 20 hours of instruction per term.) Our teacher (who is awesome, BTW) is always thinking of new games for us to play to help learn the language, and one that immediately came to my mind was Scrabble. I’ve discussed it with my fellow students and we’ve all agreed it would be fun to play outside class.
I gave her a call yesterday and placed the order. She had Scrabble in stock but wasn’t sure about Monopoly, but that’s not a problem because I’ve seen it available in other online shops. Thanks for your help!
I received both Scrabble and Monopoly a few days ago—just three days after they were mailed! My classmates and I will have a go at playing both games, making sure to speak in Icelandic only. Of course, for Monopoly we’ll have to learn some new vocabulary (mortgage, rent, dice, tax, etc.), but playing should give us lots of practice with conversations relating to buying and selling, and with numbers.
I think the board spaces are named after streets in Reykjavik, and the currency is, of course, the Icelandic króna. As there are no railways in Iceland, the four spaces with railroads in the original edition are replaced with three airports and a bus station. The airport spaces have airplane symbols instead of locomotive symbols, but curiously the bus station space retains the locomotive symbol. Unfortunately, the Chance and Community Chest cards lack the Rich Uncle Pennybags illustrations of the American edition.
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