Almost everyone has played it at some point – and it’s not hard to learn the rules if you haven’t.
You can spend as long or as short a time on each move as you like. When the two players have different amounts of free-time and/or inclination to win, one may spend a lot more time on a move than the other. I call this ‘asymmetric play’.
It requires physical ability – to see the letters on the board. Scrabble boards with larger tiles work well for If we let the user vary the ‘zoom’ or magnification level, then the level at which they choose to play tells us something about their eyesight. The number and type of mistakes they make (e.g. starting to mistake ‘Q’ for ‘O’) is also telling.
It requires mental ability. Your score is a potential proxy for your language and logic skills. With appropriate adjustment for time spent a gradual decline in score could be an early indicator of declining cognitive ability.
There’s an open-source implementation of the game – so we don’t need to reinvent the game itself – just concentrate on how to make it accessible to the partially sighted.
