Scrabble: Auction Rules

The official dictionary for Scrabble, the most popular word game in the world, is changed regularly. The most recent changes added, among others, the words "qi," "za," and "zzz" to the game -- making it much easier to use the Q and Z tiles. The Cheap Talk blog, written by two economics professors at Northwestern University, suggested that players should buy letters via auction (bidding with points) rather than pull them randomly from a bag. Two PhD students went the extra mile and drafted a set of rules for a variant they call Auction Scrabble.