[vijayr]

I'd like to add Scrabble to this list - it will be around in 45 years for sure, though the number of people playing is orders of magnitude smaller than Chess

[S4M]

Provided you like it, Scrabble can also be nice to acquire new vocabularies in foreign languages.

[chillacy]

True, in fact the french scrabble champion recently doesn't even speak french, he just memorized a ton of words: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...

[Nadya]

This is interesting in and of itself. I think it would be interesting to have a linguistic conversation surrounding it. This is akin to memorizing gibberish (in this case, words without meaning). Which is more difficult than it sounds!

I'm amazed that he also (intuitively) figured out "the French sound" (the linguistic term escapes me) well enough to be able to call out words for not being words. I wouldn't be surprised if many French speakers tried to sneak some high scoring words past him, knowing he can't speak French only to be flabbergasted when he called their bluff.

[knughit]

French has less hybrid linguistic heritage than English, so its orthography is much more regular. Scrabble is a very English game.