scrabbleActually Cheap Talk presents it, and WSJ covers it.

After QI and ZA became legal Scrabble words, a few people posited that the points accorded to the letters were now no longer appropriate with respect to the difficulty of their utilization. In other words, it was too easy to get too many points with cheap two-letter words.

Cheap Talk suggested facetiously that a way to solve this problem, and eliminate most of the luck within Scrabble at the same time, was to auction off the letters, rather than assign them randomly to each player. A couple of his students read this and went ahead and did just that. EuroScrabble, here we come.

Here are the rules. Session report here. WSJ covers it here.