I am confused. There is only one Z in the game, so the only way to get ZZZ would be to use both blanks, which would get you a lousy 10 base points. Given a blank should normally give you an out, you would be 100-150 points worse off if you played ZZZ instead of a word already in the dictionary.

So I hardly see what the issue is. Okay, so Q is a little bit easier to dump - but you could dump it pretty easily with qat anyway.

The ability to form two words containing Z/Q rather than one in a single play is a fairly big deal.

Why would the NHL want to offer an incentive for longer games? Maybe people buy more beer and food?

I believe it was the idea that: "Americans don't like tie games" combined with 4-on-4 hockey and shoot-outs will create many more short exciting scenarios that can be shown as news clips on sports shows.

I believe Major League Baseball made significant efforts a few years ago to speed up games.

Word games are an example of a genre of game that becomes utterly different at expert/professional levels than what it is at the amateur level.

For amateurs, it's a game of vocabulary, whereas it's more of a strategic game at professional levels. http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?a=6517#36

Although the scores for the letters might need to be re-calibrated; especially for a word game, Scrabble holds up extremely well at high levels of skill.

Overvalued points introduce a lot of fun and drama to the game. Sort of like the exponential escalation in Risk.

risk card values go up pretty linearly.

Yes, but capturing someone else's territory and cards can double your effective strength.

A better example in Risk is Australia, which is key to every winning game...and sort-of does limit strategic possibilities.

I'd tend to agree with you.

The point values were based on the commonality of the letters in common use, the idea being that it's harder to come up with appropriate words with letters like Z, X, Q in them. The letters' commonalities may be different for the word set of serious play-- the Scrabble dictionary-- in which case the scores become strategic features only loosely connected to historic frequencies.

I'm surprised that J is so uncommon, though. I guess it seems much more common than X and Z because there are a lot of words beginning in it, and it's also at the front of a very large number of common first names.