Board games don't have to be boring... (Scrabble Original)

Member Name: Daniel K

Product:	Scrabble Original
Date:	23/08/02 (133 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good fun to play, Can be educational, Challenging, but fun

Disadvantages: Can be a bit tedious, Some people could find it boring

Scrabble is one of my favourite board games to play, as it's very simple, and suitable for people of most ages. Up to four people can play, but there may be times when you could have lots of people joining in!

I bought Scrabble a few years ago, and have enjoyed playing it lots of times now - it is quite an addictive, fun game to play, despite being quite simple and basic. The box of Scrabble is a dark green colour, and has Scrabble written in large white lettering, as well as a large picture of two letter tiles fighting over a triple word score!

The game is simple: you begin play by selecting a tile from the bag, and the person with a letter closest to the beginning of the alphabet goes first - a person with a letter closest to the end of the alphabet goes last. Then you each select 7 word tiles each and make a word, taking it in turns to place a word on the board. The words placed on the board must cross one another, a bit like a crossword puzzle.

There's also some squares on the board that are marked 'Double/Triple word score', or 'double/triple letter score'; these are pretty self-explanetory, and can help a lot in increasing your score for a word. If you use all the letters in your rack, you can earn 50 bonus points, too.

Generally as the game goes on, it can get harder to place words, as you can run out of the 'useful' letters like a, e, s, or t, and can be left with the four tiles which are hard to play with - q, z , x, & j (and they usually are left till last!). But this can make the game more interesting! You can also use words that are only two letters long, some of these are quite obvious, but others are pretty obscure - you can either look these words up in the booklet provided in the box, or just guess one of the words!

One advantage about playing Scrabble is that you don't need to make big words to get a good score - sometimes only a four or five letter word well-placed ca
n earn you a score of over 20 or 30 points. This means that you don't need a big vocabulary or need to know long, complicated words just to get a good score!

However, one disadvantage may be that Scrabble may not be much fun to play a lot, or some people will find it too boring, but I don't! It is very good fun to play, and can be more interesting depending on the skill of the players. It can get tedious if other players take ages to make up a word from their letters, because then you're left doing nothing except waiting.

Overall, there is a lot of fun in playing Scrabble, and I would recommend it to people who have not played it before. There's also lots of new variants on the original game of Scrabble, listed inside the booklet you get inside the game, like Scrabble Bingo, for example, meaning that you can try some of these as an alternative to the 'normal' way of playing the game.

Just buy it, start playing, and have fun!

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