Scramble your brain with Scrabble (Scrabble Original)

Member Name: Mildew82

Product:	Scrabble Original
Date:	04/07/09 (149 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Mentally stimulating, expands your vocabulary

Disadvantages: Can be frustrating with constantly poor letters

Scrabble is a great family word game made by Mattel that really makes you think. A good vocabulary, anagram skills and imaginative visualisation are vital to make this game competitive and fun.

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The Rules
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The game of scrabble consists of 100 lettered tiles (of all the letters of the alphabet), a 15 by 15 grid board and an opaque bag from which to select the tiles from. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a value based upon its volume and the assumed difficulty to get that letter down, e.g. A has a 1 point value and Z has a 10 point value. Blank tiles are worth 0 points but can be used as any letter you want.

These are the tiles:

Letter Value Frequency
A - 1 - 9
B - 3 - 2
C - 3 - 2
D - 2 - 4
E - 1 - 12
F - 4 - 2
G - 2 - 3
H - 4 - 2
I - 1 - 9
J - 8 - 1
K - 5 - 1
L - 1 - 4
M - 3 - 2
N - 1 - 6
O - 1 - 8
P - 3 - 2
Q - 10 - 1
R - 1 - 6
S - 1 - 4
T - 1 - 6
U - 1 - 4
V - 4 - 2
W - 4 - 2
X - 8 - 1
Y - 4 - 2
Z - 10 - 1
Blank - 0 - 2


The aim of Scrabble is to cumulate points by laying tiles down on the board to form words. The player with the highest score at the end wins. A game can consist of 2, 3 or 4 players.

The typical way to decide which player goes first is each player will select one tile from the bag and the closest to A will go first. To begin each player will select 7 tiles from the bag and the person picked to go first will make the first move.

On each go you have a choice of laying down your tiles to form a word (the first move must cross the middle square on the board and will get double points and any subsequent moves must connect to tiles already laid down), exchanging some of your tiles by replacing them with the same number from the bag (there must be 7 or more tiles remaining in the bag) or passing and keeping the same tiles you already have but scoring 0 points. When connecting to the tiles already on the board you can only move horizontally or vertically (diagonally, right to left and bottom to top are not allowed).

To score you will receive the value of the points you have put down plus any bonuses if you managed to lay your tiles on the specially marked bonus squares. These bonus squares are double letter, triple letter, double word and triple word. You will receive the value of your tile twice at the intersection point if you manage to get one word or more going both horizontally and vertically.

If you manage to get a tile covering both a double/triple letter square as well as another tile reaching either a double/triple word square then to calculate the score you would add up the individual word score plus the extra points from the double/triple letter square and then you would double/triple that total to get your final score.

Also, if you manage to get all your 7 tiles down in one word you get a Bingo! which gives you an extra 50 bonus points to your score.

One other element to this game is that your opponents will be able to challenge any words you put down that they feel are suspect - if they are right then you must take your tiles back and forfeit your go for 0 points.

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Why is it fun?
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Scrabble may sound like a horribly intellectual game with lots of adding up but it is actually a lot of fun. You can get a lot of satisfaction by getting exceptionally high scores from putting down just a few tiles, and with so many ways to score highly you are never really out of the game even if you feel like all hope is lost - it just takes one bingo and you're right back in there!

I really like this game as you are constantly thinking and I feel that the more you play the better you will get as you learn new tricks and new words. I think that if you are a newcomer you should study the Scrabble dictionary just to see what weird and wonderful words there are out there - who would have thought that EUOI is a word?

This game can be a lot of fun (as long as you are not to competitive and a sore loser), but be warned it can be agonisingly frustrating when you just can't get decent letters. There's nothing worse to make you feel like throwing the whole game out of the window then having 4 Os 2 Us and an I, struggling to get an O and a U down only to pick up another 2 Os whilst your opponent is putting down Qs and Js left right and centre! But every game is different and in my experience it all evens out!

Also, if you really want to spice things up you can elect to play rude Scrabble - but this is a lot harder than you think. Trying to justify that the word box is actually rude isn't all that easy ;-) ! Plus it works better if there is alcohol involved.

There are many way to play scrabble - on theboard from the Original game which has a few other releases such as the 60th Anniversary, Junior Scrabble and Scrabble Deluxe, online (seriously addictive and harmful to your employment status if you can get facebook at work), and as a computer game.

From Amazon you can get the original game for £14.61 and a dictionary for £3.77 so it's fairly cheap - or you can play online for free!
So in conclusion, Scrabble is an excellent game for people who love word games and have a good vocabulary or want to expand their current one. Every game is different and some can be very exciting when there are only a few tiles left and the scores are dramatically close.

Summary: Scrabble is an great competitive game for anyone who loves word games