The lessons of woke Scrabble

“THICK”, scoffed the headline on the Daily Mail website on April 9th, in response to the news that Scrabble has had an overhaul. In some parts of the world the word-play game has been relaunched with a double-sided board; one side now shows a new, simpler design that is meant to be less intimidating and more inclusive than the original.

The idea that Scrabble needs to be made less competitive in order to be attractive to Gen Z was always going to make some people rather vexed (16 points). “Next, they’ll turn to chess, but with only one piece each and only two squares on the board,” ran one typically balanced reader comment. Rants about snowflakes and wokeness aside, the new version of the game, which Mattel is introducing outside North America, looks like a perfectly good solution to a common strategic problem: how to make changes to much-loved products.