It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an "I"
Written: Jun 01 '04 (Updated Sep 19 '06)
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Pros: Fun, challenging, educational, easy to learn and play
Cons: Lots of pieces to lose
The Bottom Line: A great family game. Still challenging and fun for adults but can be adapted for younger children.
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| mmcphee's Full Review: Scrabble |
My husband and I are huge baseball fans. But watching games most nights of the week eats up a lot of time. We try and find other activities to do while we watch the games. One of the more intellectually stimulating ways we pass the time is to play Scrabble
The Basics
Scrabble, like Monopoly, got its birth during the Great Depression. For more than 50 years people have been playing this classic crossword style word game. Scrabble it for 2-4 players ages 8 and up.
A $12 Scrabble game gets you a heavy-duty cardboard game board with 225 squares, 100 wooden lettered tiles (including 2 blank tiles) and 4 wooden tile holder racks. I believe our game also came with a long since discarded plastic bag to hold the letters. The game ends when all of the tiles are drawn and one player has used up all of his or her letters or when no one can make any additional plays. The person with the highest score wins.
Playing the Game
To begin each player draws a letter. The person with the letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first with play continuing clockwise around the board. Each player in turn draws 7 tiles from the bag and places them on their rack. Then he or she tries to make a word with their letters and then tries to find a place on the board to play their word. Blank tiles are wild and can be used for any letter. The first word played must go through the center square, as indicated by the star on the pink square. Words can only be made horizontally and vertically, never diagonally. All subsequent words played must touch at least one word already on the board. All letters played must form words.
Each letter also has a small number on the front of the tile for scoring purposes. To score a word, add up the value of each letter, blanks are scored as zero points. Then add in any bonuses. The game board has a variety of colored squares. Light blue squares double the value of the letter and dark blue squares triple it. Pink squares (including the starting square) double the value of the word, and the red squares triple the value of the word. When calculating scores double and triple the letter scores before computing any double and triple word bonuses. If a player uses all 7 of their tiles in a single turn, called a bingo, they get a 50-point bonus.
If the first word played is HAT, the next player could add IE going down off of the T in HAT to make TIE. Or the player could add the word SNOW by adding the S at the end of HAT to make HATS and continuing down to make SNOW. This move would allow the player to score for HATS and SNOW. Or the player might decide to make the word NOD by laying the word below HAT with the N starting below the A. The player then gets to score 3 words – AN, TO (reading downward) and NOD.
Once a player has made their move, and no one has challenged the word, they draw tiles from the bag so that they once again have 7 tiles. If another player challenges the word, it is looked up in the dictionary. If the word is correct play resumes, but the player who challenged incorrectly loses their next turn. If the challenged word is not valid then the played removes the word from the board and forfeits that turn. You cannot use words that are always capitalized, abbreviations, words with apostrophes or hyphens, or prefixes or suffixes. You can use any dictionary that everyone agrees on, but there is an “Official Scrabble Players Dictionary” if you are so inclined.
Skill, Strategy and Luck
Scrabble has a nice combination of all three elements, but this is a game mostly of luck. If you draw the letters with the higher point values you have a better chance of forming words with higher scores. Letters are distributed based on how often they are used in the English language, there are 12 E tiles and 9 A tiles, but only one each of J,K,Q,X and Z. The Z and Q are worth 10 points each while the vowels and other common letters (like N,L,T and S) are only worth 1 point each. Although a commonly used letter, S is only on 4 tiles. This was done so as to eliminate extensive use of simply pluralizing words. The entire letter distribution is printed on the front of the game board.
But getting all of the high point value letters does not guarantee you a victory. There is some strategy to the game. If the board is set so that a player may be able to reach a triple letter score, even if you can’t block them! Even if it means you may not be making the highest scoring play possible stop your opponents from getting even higher scores. If your opponent happens to be more involved in the game on television than your Scrabble game board, well who says you can’t slip in a misspelled or even made up word once in a while. Even if your opponent notices they may decide not to risk losing their turn by challenging your word. To some it may sound like cheating, but I compare it to bluffing while playing cards, it is all part of the game.
Scrabble, being a word game, yes there is some skill involved as well. The larger your vocabulary and the better your chances are for making a word with your tiles. Did you know there are at least 9 words (plus plurals) that start with Q and don’t need a U following? There are an additional 6 words (plus plurals) that have a Q in the middle without a following U. Knowing those words can make playing that 10 point Q much easier. There are 96 two-letter words that come in very handy at the end of the game when space is difficult to come by. Some may argue that memorizing lists isn’t much of a skill, but I’ve learned some interesting words this way. I do take the time to read the definitions of the words as opposed to simply committing the various lists to memory. And since I am not generally good at strict memorization anyway I have yet to commit all of the Q without a U words to memory anyway.
Leveling the Playing Field
While the age recommendation may be for ages 8 and up, obviously a 3rd grader isn’t going to be able to compete on the same level as an adult. You may want to consider giving children looser rules to play by. You may let them use the dictionary to look up words using the letters on their rack instead of reserving the dictionary for challenges only. Suspending the no proper words rule may let them use their friend’s names and places they have learned about in school. When I was young my parents let me change in letters and not have to give up my turn, as the standard rules require.
Final Thoughts
We play quite a bit of Scrabble at night after the kids are in bed. It requires some thinking, but it isn’t overly taxing. We are pretty evenly matched so we each win about half of the time. The biggest drawback to the games can be their length, it takes the two of us about 90 minutes to play a single game, but they can go much longer. We sometimes play speed Scrabble, where each person only gets 1 minute to play a word or they forfeit their turn. Playing this way means we can complete a game in around half an hour.
I’ve owned the same Scrabble game for over 20 years. Nothing has changed in the game so I see no reason to upgrade, except for the fact that we are now down to 98 tiles from the original 100. There are a lot of pieces to keep track of with Scrabble and we are missing IT. You can buy an entire replacement set of letters (along with the racks and the tile pouch) for $6.50, but it is almost as much as buying a whole new game. It doesn’t really matter that much to us, so we just make without a couple of letters.
Want More Information
Product Website:
http://www.hasbro.com/pl/page.viewproduct/product_id.9495/dn/scrabble/home.cfm
Missing Pieces
http://www.hasbro.com/forms/orderform.cfm?prod=Scrabble&sku=4024
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): gift
Type of Toy: Board Game
Age Range of Child: 9 Years or Older
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mmcphee
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Location: Nutmeg State
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