My grandmother is an avid player and has told the story of how she used to play with the inventor, back before the game was sold and mass-marketed! The rules were different back then, and I believe, better. Here is the variation we play with:

A common problem with scrabble is that, given a bad hand of tiles, boards get very "closed" very quickly with three- and four-letter words that offer little to no opportunity to play off of. The solution is to allow tile-swapping, on your turn, before you play a word. Many people do this with blanks - swap a valid letter in your hand for a blank on the board. We do it with ALL letters (on your turn, one letter at a time, as many swaps as you want before you lay your word).

The result is an exponentially increased field of possibilities, longer words and a more open board. And more fun for even novice players, once they get the hang of it. It's not uncommon for intermediate players to get three or more "bingos" in an average game this way.

I'm intrigued but do not quite understand exactly what you mean by tile-swapping. Do you mean that you can take, say, FATE on the board and swap out an L in your hand to make it LATE, taking the F for yourself? I assume you could then in the same turn, say, play an R off the LATE? Tile exchanges are not scored?

Do you have problems where the slightly better players find ways to endlessly re-use the high-scoring tiles, thus annoying the heck out of the other players? ("Oh, geez, there he goes making JINX on a triple-word score again.")

Exactly.

Yes, sometimes if you have six out of a seven-letter word and just need one, you might do several swaps to get that last letter you need for the bingo. Which is why, since the turns can be longer, it takes first-timers some getting used to.

I believe ultimately the game becomes more fun and playable. It also tends to smooth out the "luck" of drawing a Z or an X, since as you point out these letters get re-used by all players throughout the game.

I'll have to try it. My wife keeps wanting to play but we both end up having to play a metagame of not making moves that lock up the board, which is... well... a very different game. We do have a long-standing house rule where the list of all valid 2-letter words is kept open and public, which does help quite a bit.

Saw a fascinating documentary on the odd world of competitive Scrabble. "Word Wars" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars

Rather interesting that to this day players still pull tiles out of a bag (which is open to cheating as the article states). Seems to me there should have been any number of low tech solutions to this in play by now.

Word Freak (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Word-Freak-Eccentric-Heartbreak-Comp...) the book that preceded the film is also a similarly fascinating read.

I thought "word wars" was a good pun already but then I read the subtitle.

I imagine one could have something like a pez dispenser, but that dispenses tiles instead. Randomisation would still be an issue though.

Isn't this basically a shuffling machine with blocks instead of cards? Surely a solution is a smart engineer away.