North American Scrabble competitors will no longer be able to play racist and homophobic slurs from the “N-word” to “bumboy” and “poofs”, the head of the players’ association has said, in an 11th-hour ruling that went against his own advisory board. John Chew, chief executive of the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), said he was overturning a vote by the board against the proposed change, and would remove a list of more than 230 offensive words from the game. “We cannot … continue to look only inward or think that how we feel about our vocabulary is more important than broader social issues,” he said in an emailed statement late on Thursday.