Don't Scrabble, play sedately (Scrabble Original)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	Scrabble Original
Date:	28/06/09 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: SImple to play, good for a wide variety of ages and abilities

Disadvantages: Some people find it boring so don't like playing.

Scrabble is probably my favourite board game, I even have a proper scrabble dictionary to go with the game! - it's just a shame that so few people in my family agree with me so I don't get to play it very often.

The basic idea is that each player is takes out 7 letter tiles from a bag and then tries to use those letter tiles to make words on a board. Each letter scores points partly according to it's commonness or not and partly according to where on the board you place it. What I mean by this is that A, E, S and other commonly used letters have a tile value of just 1 where as less common letters such as Q or Z score higher amounts. As well as this there are certain squares on the board which double or triple letter or word values so strategic placing as well as good words is crucial. The aim - simply to score more points than your opponents through out the game.
Actually that's one of the things I like best about scrabble, even if you're not the wordiest person in the world, you can still play a good game and get high scores if you are clever with your placement. I actually find it quite a lot more challenging to play someone who plays the game this way than to play someone who knows loads of really clever words, but isn't very good at placing them.

Scrabble can be played by 2-4 players, and to be honest most games I play are just me and one other person (usually my mum who also likes scrabble). We do occasionally manage to persuade others to join in, but not often. I think playing it as a 2 player game holds just as much fun as if you play with 3 or 4 people which is good because a lot of board games that are designed for multiple players can be a bit boring or awkward to play if it's just 2 people.

Having a scrabble dictionary helps with this game a lot in my opinion. It's not actually a real dictionary, it's just a book with a very very long list of words in it - there are no definitions included. But it does let you check if a word is allowed easily which a regular dictionary often doesn't unless you own a full compendium of dictionaries due to the lack of space in most to include all words.

Strategy does play a bit of a part in this game, but nothing like as much as many, if you have a Q for example but no U in your hand or useable on the board, then you have to decide how long to risk holding on to the Q or whether to miss a turn effectively by exchanging some letters. (This is because if you are still holding any letters at the end of the game when someone plays their last tile, the tile value of those letters is taken off your score, and Q is a high value tile so you don't want to be left with it!).

I have a simple version of the game, the board is flat and you do have to be a little bit careful not to knock it as if you do the tiles can move slightly and then you have to stop and push everything back into place. There is a deluxe version however which has a board with raised lines between each square so that when you place the tiles on the board they can't be knocked so easily. If I remember rightly this deluxe board is also on a kind of turn table so that if you sit round a table you can spin it round so it faces the next player easily instead of some people having to view the board upside down. Now to be honest I normally play this game with another adult so for me not having the deluxe version doesn't bother us in the slightest, however I can see the advantages if you have kids playing - or even just kids in the house when you are playing as it would make game play for the kids easier as they're not having to read anything upside down, and of course there would be less knocks to disrupt the game play.

I love this game so much because it's one that makes you use your brain a bit. There are so many board games out there designed for kids and adults, but very few of them really make you think, and this one does. I do get a bit sick of pushing a counter round a board to reach 'home' first.

One final thing I would say, is if you play scrabble on the computer or something like a Nintendo DS, be careful about word useage. I have found that these computer versions often don't use the same dictionary, so you'll have to agree which dictionary to use before you start playing so that there is no confusion. (I got very frustrated when I first started playing on the DS because words I knew were ok, it wouldn't accept!).

Summary: A nice wordy game to make you use your brain a little.