Back to index of games pages by Donald Sauter.
Visit my page of Scrabble variants.
See my
Dover Scrabble Club rules for the ideas presented here distilled
down to a set of rules suitable for implementation in your own play.
See my
Championship Scrabble page to cut to the chase and view games played
according to all the proposals here side-by-side with games from the final
rounds of the 2008 National Scrabble Championship.
How would you like your finished Scrabble boards to look like this? (I've shown the same board twice, the second time with all the tiles flipped across the diagonal so you can easily see every word played by reading horizontally.)
R
A D
C W M O
O MORAL * COP QUINCES JUTS
RAMPAgER R A U V T
U CRIBs I gUAVA E F I
QUAG a E COON ME G A L E
U V N E A OR SPOTTIER
I A T d Y C R C A O N
N S E WINS A WARRaNTER Q T
C APART E I L I T U SCAR
EVE O REpOURED B W E BEVY
S TOQUE O N sEEdIER
T L N E
J FLINTS K K CAYS pOLKA
U E C AVOID O O V
DOTTIER AB T O U O
S RE E * IN CAIRN KITE
V E D
Y D
If you're familiar with the typical, completed, tournament-style Scrabble board, your jaw should drop. Boards like the above become the norm if you implement the guidelines suggested in this page. If you accept them all, you, too, will experience . . . Transcendental Scrabble!
About my book report on Word Freak: while it was a later addition to this page, it may make a more entertaining starting point for my thoughts here on a more vocabulary-based Scrabble.
Here's what's in store. All links are internal - just start reading instead of clicking.
In November 1997 a World Scrabble Championship tournament was held in Washington D.C. As sure as night follows day, the newspapers breathlessly recounted the oddball words played: foy, tui, dzho, zho, vug, birr, yays, taiga, jefe, uncini, obied, gloze, yauper, exeme, metic . . .
Make you want to pull your Scrabble set down and have a rollicking, laughin'-and-scratchin' time with family and friends? Or, make you want to devote your life to memorizing useless letter combinations so you can slaughter Mama, Sis, and Grandpa, before moving on to the Scrabble big boys?
Me neither.
Actually, the situation isn't as hopeless as I've portrayed it. The media do seem to recognize of the absurdity of it all. The Washington Times admits, "Most points are earned from little words even the average college professor has never heard of." The Times also gets in a little jab at the player who knows "at least 150,000 words by now . . . Well, he knows how to spell them, that is."
Nor is the artificiality lost on the Baltimore Sun: "They simply memorize tens of thousands of letter combinations that coincidentally make words. As even a top American competitor noted, 'I don't think of them as words, I think of them as letter sequences.'"
Jeezy-peezy. Why not just use numerals instead of letters? We could randomly choose a set of 150,000 acceptable Scrabble Numbers between 10 and 99,999,999. And, hey! - we could keep things fresh by choosing a different set of 150,000 numbers every year! (Be advised, this paragraph is sarcasm.)
I doubt that Scrabble was created with the idea of memorizing valid "letter sequences". I maintain that Scrabble is plenty fun and remains fresh indefinitely using just the tens of thousands of words we carry around in our own brains - as originally intended.
This claim serves as the basis for most of these thoughts and suggestions on various aspects of Scrabble. I hope that some of them will work as well for you as they have for me and my friends and family and the illustrious Dover Scrabble Club.
This first section is dedicated to the proposition that no one likes to be hoodwinked.
Prior to 1976 and going back at least as far as 1948 the box-top challenge rule was simply, "If the word challenged is unacceptable, the player takes back his tiles and loses his turn."
In 1976 this addition was made: "If the word challenged is acceptable, the challenger loses his turn."
At that moment Scrabble ceased to be a word game and became a whatever? game. You could win with dumb, but honest, misspellings. You could win by bluffing.
No doubt, a poker-style game is fun for some players, but they're surely a small minority. When you look up a misspelled word at the end of a game and point it out, who wants to be laughed at and told, "Well, you should have challenged, hahaha!" I've seen it go the other way, too - a player who feels guilty or disappointed with himself for scoring points for an honest misspelling. None of this anguish is necessary.
If you've come to Scrabble since 1976, consider whether Scrabble makes more sense and would be more satisfying if everyone had to make good words to score points. This is right in line with almost all sport and game competition - you get credit for doing something right; you don't get credit for failure. If you are greedy for more points, you accept full responsibility for playing a riskier word.
So, for years I stumped for what I call no-risk challenge, that is, the pre-1976 box-top rule. Another term is free challenge. This has always been the British rule, and is the rule in international competition, so I'd like to think I have some heavy artillery on my side in this matter. I can't help thinking it is a tiny handful of American tournament players who are forcing the poker-style game on everyone else, even recreational players who have never contemplated entering a Scrabble tournament. (You can find a, or the, reason why top experts need to bluff in my book report on Word Freak below.)
ATTENTION: No-risk challenge does NOT mean you get to play again if the word you played is bad. Everybody asks that; I don't know why.
Although I'm as strong a proponent of no-risk challenge as ever, I now view the process simply as one of double-checking, not challenging. Double-checking is not taken personally. If anyone, including the player who spelled the word, has the tiniest twinge of a doubt - look it up. You'll be surprised how often players can be "positive" a word is good, while the so-called "word" somehow managed to slip the mind of the panel of experts who created the dictionary. In any case, it's very satisfying to find the word sitting there in black and white.
You will see that all of the Scrabble suggestions in this page are independent of each other. Just below I argue for using a conventional dictionary instead of the OSPD. Please give the Good Words Only rule fair consideration, no matter what dictionary, OSPD or conventional, you go with.
The advantage of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary (OSPD) is that it shows explicitly all of the inflected forms of a word. The drawback is that it contains too many darn words.
That, in itself, is not a problem, but since it is "official" it has been scrutinized by serious players and all sorts of word lists have been derived from it loaded with obscure words. Unfortunately, it is impossible to have a good, competitive game of Scrabble between players familiar with word lists and players who aren't.
A familiar scenario at a typical Scrabble club is when the newcomer expresses shock and dismay at all the seemingly nonsensical and foreign-looking words on the boards. He is told, "Look, if it's in the OSPD, it's acceptable. Like it or lump it." Not surprisingly, most newcomers don't show up a second time.
In particular, the 2- and 3-letter word lists give a huge advantage to those who know them. An intelligent person with a huge vocabulary and infallible spelling and a natural flair for Scrabble strategy would hardly have a chance against someone armed with these goodies.
Here's my suggestion for both moving towards a more vocabulary-based Scrabble and leveling the playing field. Choose a conventional collegiate dictionary as your reference. I use the American Heritage Second College Edition (AmH2), which dates from 1985. [Note, Nov 2007: I have since moved up to the American Heritage Fourth Edition (AmH4), which dates from 2006, but have left everything in this section stand as it was for the AmH2. Visit my Dover Scrabble Club Rules page to see how the AmH4 affects the various word lists you see here.]
You must also procure an OSPD, but just use it for inflected forms not explicitly shown in your conventional dictionary.
For example, if your dictionary does not show all the RE- or UN- words, as the American Heritage does not, then refer to the OSPD.
The American Heritage explicitly shows the comparative and superlative (-ER and -EST) forms for adjectives which have their own entry, but does not show them if the adjective is tacked on at the end of another entry. For example, BLOTCHY is given under BLOTCH, so the dictionary is mum on BLOTCHIER. If there's any question, I would have to check the OSPD. (If that one seems obvious, what about BLUBBERIEST?)
The American Heritage does a fine job on the -ER ("one that") words, so there's no need for the OSPD there. Check your dictionary for a few examples like FINGERER, HISSER, CURBER, and CARPOOLER to see if you trust it for such words that have no life outside of "one that does it".
Other sorts of words you might need to go to the OSPD for are those of the form, OUT-, OVER-, -LESS, and -LIKE.
The two-letter words are of fundamental importance in Scrabble. They are the connectors that allow you to form a word in your rack and place it somewhere on the board. Think of them as the mortar that holds the Scrabble board together. When I quiz a novice about the importance of two-letter words, he will usually say they are handy for getting rid of leftovers at the end of a game. Ok, but that's incidental. The two-letter words are crucial to the play throughout the whole game.
Because they are so important - and also because so many of them are dubious as proper words - the valid two-letter words should be made available to everyone during play in perpetuity. Think of the two-letter words as "equipment". No sport would be fair if one side doesn't have all of the basic equipment.
You are thinking, "Yikes! You want me to go through my dictionary page by page to dig out all the two-letter words?" No. Use this list of 101 two-letter words from the OSPD (4th edition) as a basis and just check the most suspect ones.
101 Two-letter Words - OSPD4 AA AB AD AE AG AH AI AL AM AN AR AS AT AW AX AY BA BE BI BO BY DE DO ED EF EH EL EM EN ER ES ET EX FA FE GO HA HE HI HM HO ID IF IN IS IT JO KA KI LA LI LO MA ME MI MM MO MU MY NA NE NO NU OD OE OF OH OI OM ON OP OR OS OW OX OY PA PE PI QI RE SH SI SO TA TI TO UH UM UN UP US UT WE WO XI XU YA YE YO ZA
The American Heritage Second College Edition (AmH2) shoots down these 35 two-letter words:
AA AB AE AG AL BA BI DE ED ES ET FE HM JO KA KI MM MO NA NE OD OE OI OM OP OW OY QI TA UM UN XU YA YO ZA
Now be honest, do they look like words to you? How often have you used them, besides a few grunts and groans? How many can you define? How many have you ever even heard or seen before? Jettisoning that craziness leaves the following list of 66 two-letter words which is consistent with the AmH2:
66 Two-letter Words - AmH2 AD AH AI AM AN AR AS AT AW AX AY BE BO BY DO EF EH EL EM EN ER EX FA GO HA HE HI HO ID IF IN IS IT LA LI LO MA ME MI MU MY NO NU OF OH ON OR OS OX PA PE PI RE SH SI SO TI TO UH UP US UT WE WO XI YE
As far as I'm concerned, that's more than enough. If it were up to me, I would outlaw all interjections except AH, HA and OH; all foreign units of currency and measure (we have our own); and the spelling of letters. Letters are the building blocks of words, not words themselves!
Even if you have a different dictionary, you could use the above list by decree. All that matters is that all the players have total access to the same set of two-letter words. A Scrabble game is a meaningless exercise otherwise.
Also in the interest of fairness, I recommend that a little list of the Q, X, and Z goodies be made available to everyone. These are in the AmH2:
AZO COX COZ DEX LUX PIX PYX QUA SOX WIZ ZAX ZEK ZIT ZOA
As with the oddball two-letter words, if one person knows them, everybody should know them. Just tack the ones that are in your chosen dictionary onto your two-letter word list.
So now you're all set for playing real Scrabble with a real dictionary, EXCEPT . . .
Now the poor soul who has devoted hours, weeks, or years of his life to studying the OSPD is at a disadvantage. He has lots of obscure words memorized and doesn't know which are valid in the conventional dictionary.
This is not an insurmountable problem. Provide a list of words disallowed by your dictionary. Again, doing the legwork for you, here are all of the two- and three-letter words allowed by the OSPD4 but not allowed by the AmH2. We've already met the disallowed two-letter words, and they aren't really needed here since the list of allowed two-letter words will be made available, but I include them for the sake of completeness.
Disallowed Two- and Three-letter words AA AB AE AG AL BA BI DE ED ES ET FE HM JO KA KI MM MO NA NE OD OE OI OM OP OW OY QI TA UM UN XU YA YO ZA
AAL AAS ABO ABS ABY AFF AGS AHI AHS AIT ALS AMI AMU ANE APO APP ARB ARF ATT AVA AWA BAL BAM BAP BAS BES BIO BIZ BRO BRR BUB CEL CEP CIG CIS COR CRU DAK DAL DAN DEB DEF DEL DEV DIF DIS DOC DOM DOR DUH DUI DUP EAU ECU EDS EEK EFF ELD EME ENG ERS FAB FEH FEM FER FES FET FEU FIZ FOH FON FOU FOY FUB FUD FUG GAE GAN GED GEN GEY GHI GIT GOR GOX GUV HAO HEH HET HIC HMM HON HOS HUN HUP HYP ICK IFF IGG JEE JEU JEW JIN JOE JOW JUS KAE KAF KAS KAT KEP KEX KIR KIS KOA KOB KOI KOP KOS KUE KYE LAR LAT LAV LES LEZ LIN LUM LUV MAE MAX MED MEG MEL MIB MIC MIG MIM MOC MOG MOL MOR MOS MUN MUT MYC NAH NAM NAN NAW NEG NOH NOM NOO OBA OBE OCA ODA ODS OES OHS OKA OKE OLE OMS ONO ONS OOH OOT OPE OPS OSE OXO OXY PAX PEC PED PEH PHT PIU POH POI POM POO POW PST PUD PUR PYE QAT QIS RAI RAS RAX REC REE REF REG REI REX RIA RIF RIN ROM SAB SAE SAU SEG SEI SEL SER SHA SHH SIM SKA SOM SRI SUK SUQ SYN TAE TAO TAS TEG TEL TET TEW THO TSK TUI TUX TWA TYE UKE ULU UMM UNS UPO URB URD URP UTA UTE VAC VAR VAU VAW VEG VID VIG VIS VOE VOX VUG VUM WAB WAE WAP WAT WHA WIS WOG WUD WYN YAG YAR YAY YID YOB YOK YOM YUK YUM YUP ZAG ZAS ZEP ZIG ZIN ZUZ
Once again, pause and look at the above list of oddball words. Do you feel any great sense of loss? No one has vested me with the authority to decide what is and isn't a word, but you know you're just being contrary if you argue those words aren't far-fetched, in the strongest and most literal sense of the word. Where do the Scrabble people go to dig them up?
In the fast food line
Momma to little boy: What do you want, Johnny?
Johnny (4-year-old, still getting a grip on this speech thing): I wan' pees-suh [pizza].
Scrabble pro, whipping out cell phone: Boss! Get this down, we need it! I heard it with my own two ears! The kid said, "I want a piece o' ZA"!
But don't take it from me; you can ask Microsoft Word's spell-checker. It flunks over 80 percent of those 3-letter beauties, urp. (Excuse me.) And have you ever heard anyone gripe about Word's spell-checker being overly strict, or too limiting, or just plain "not with it"?
I'm not such a mindless devotee of my American Heritage that I don't see a few words in there that look ok to me: REF TUX BIO MIC, and maybe UKE, YAY and YUP. REF seems classier to me than UMP, which the dictionary does include. YAY is more than just a whoop - "it's yay big." The American Heritage gives every other alternative and informal way to say "yes" - YAH, YEA, YEH, and YEP - why not YUP? I'm most amazed to find that MIC is just now being added to any dictionaries. I would have thought it to be a word of choice for over 50 years. But it was only added to the Scrabble word list in March 2006, and is still failed by MS Word. [I mention again that I have since moved up to the American Heritage Fourth Edition. The AmH4 now includes REF TUX BIO MIC UKE YAY and YUP. Junk words YAH and YEH have been dropped - an excellent move in my view.]
The point is, half a dozen three-letter words out of a pool of 1015 is simply no big deal. I'm sure the American Heritage panel of experts had their reasons in every case. If I went with a different dictionary it would just be a different half dozen words. Making your own additions to your chosen authority sounds like a slippery slope you don't want to get on. Choose a dictionary and stick to it. [Some words added to the AmH4 made me unhappy enough to generate a short list of personally disallowed words. Again, see my page of Dover Scrabble Club rules.]
In addition to a thorough job on the three-letter words, accumulate a list of longer OSPD words which are not allowed by your conventional dictionary. No need to devote hours to comparing dictionaries; just note the ones that pop up in play. Here is such a list that I use with the American Heritage dictionary.
Longer Words in the OSPD
but NOT in the AmH2ABYE AMOKS AZON BANTY BIGS BITTY BIZE BONK BORTZ BRIE CAID CHEAPED DA DAWED DEXY DIXIT DJIN DJINN DOOMY DORKY DOTY EQUID FEDS FICO FIXT FOOTIE FOOTY FRIZ GAMEY GOOP GUIRO HEROS HOTS HOYLE INDRI IXIA JAKE JANE JEEP JEEZ JETE JINN JOLE JOTA JUKE KADI KAIF KAIL LAURA MALTY MEANIE MEANY MIAOU MULED NEGROID OXIM OXIME PIAN PREZ QAID QUARE QUATE QUEY QUIN QUININ QURSH REVOTE SHEW SHOG SIKE SKINT SQUOOSH SQUUSH THUGGEE TONGER TOUGHED TURK VANED VINED VITA VOLTA WEAVED YOWED ZITIS
The lists of disallowed words are kept under wraps, if only because, if a list is out, some players spend all their time staring at it instead of looking for words in their racks. If a player is wondering if a word such as DOR or IXIA is valid, he announces it and somebody checks the list. He's told it is no good, and he then makes a different play. If he had gone ahead and made his play involving DOR, it would be found on the list and he would remove it and make another play. The reason for asking in advance is that it saves time, and the player doesn't reveal so many letters in his rack.
Eventually someone will play an OSPD word that is not acceptable in the chosen dictionary, but which is not already on the list above. This can be handled two ways.
1. He removes it and makes another play.
2. He removes it and loses his turn.
Method 1 would seem to be the most reasonable and friendly, but my experience with serious Scrabble players is that they are adamant about not making a distinction between normal and oddball words. They will play oddball after oddball until you're ready to cram the tiles down their throats. On the board, even. For that reason, I recommend Method 2. A compromise would be to set a limit on these sorts of plays, something like three per game without penalty. In any case, whenever one of these sorts of words is played, add it to the list so it doesn't happen again.
Now you really do have everything you need for a real game of real Scrabble, using a real dictionary, involving any sort of players from recreational to the world champ. If you are a serious player, the maintenance of the disallowed word list lets you to switch gears between tournament play and games with friends and family. I can attest to this from personal experience. When you play in a social setting, just make it clear to everyone that it's a list of words that can't be played. No one can object to that.
If you're on the go, you don't even have to lug along your big, fat, conventional dictionary. The list of disallowed words and a lightweight, paperback OSPD will have you playing your conventional dictionary in absentia. If, under such circumstances, someone does come up with a four- or more letter OSPD word not in your conventional dictionary, more power to him.
A word about points. It stands to reason that you will not be able to score quite as many points using a conventional dictionary as with the OSPD. You'll have to make do with 36 points for CRUX instead of 54 for XU on triple-letter score, oh my. But so what? Points are arbitrary things - you'll still be scoring a heck of a lot more points than basketball players. In any case, the difference between real dictionary points and OSPD points, if it matters at all (which, as I've just said, doesn't) is surprisingly small. If you're still reticent about stepping down a fraction of a point per turn to play normal words, just be patient. There are further innovations below that will have you scoring 8 or 10 points per turn more than in your conventional, tournament-style OSPD Scrabble.
Long, long ago I became bored with the Scrabble tile distribution. One Q, one Z, four S, two blanks, game after game, week after week, month after month, year after year . . . snore.
My solution was to mix three sets together and draw out a hundred tiles from the mixture. Buy up a few extra Scrabble games at yard sales.
You can scoop out the 100 tiles quickly and easily if you find a cup that is the just the right size. I have a 10-ounce plastic cup that does the job. You could also take something like a peanut butter jar, put 100 tiles in, and draw a little line at the fill point.
A few extra or less tiles doesn't matter. In fact, a side benefit of scooping tiles is that you can beef up the number of tiles. Throw in an extra handful of about 8 to 12 tiles; the board can easily handle it. This is particularly beneficial for 3- or 4-person games. Players will get an extra turn or two compared to the skimpy number they get in a 100-tile game.
Rather than simply mixing together three straight sets of tiles, I highly recommend correcting the over-representation of the letter I. Remove three letter I from the mixture and replace one with an A, one with an E, and one with an O. Kiss goodbye those annoying three-I and four-I racks which pop up so often using the standard tile set. I consider the overload of the letter I the only real flaw in Alfred Butts' wonderful creation.
Using a mixed set of tiles in no way alters the fundamental essence of Scrabble. It plays the exact same way: there's the board; you have a rack of tiles; you have to find something in your rack that fits on the board. It's like playing golf on different courses; it's still golf - and a heck of a lot more fun than playing the same course all your life. A Scrabble novice wouldn't even notice anything out of the ordinary playing from a mixed set, but a more experienced player will get a kick out of the funny little things that happen. I've played a game with 6 V; a game with 6 blanks; a game with 9 S; a game with just 5 E and 4 I(!); a game with no B, no F, no H, but 9 L and 14(!) N; a game with 17 power tiles; a game where three players each used his own Q to make himself a 60-point play; and a game where a lone Q was stuck on each of the three racks at the end. Neat!
Note that the mixed set of tiles kicks the stuffing out of tile-tracking. Who needs it? Isn't it more exciting not knowing what's left in the bag or on everybody's racks?
With the OSPD, it is absurdly easy to score big points with two-letter words. Is that what Scrabble is about - making teensy-weensy words, many of which are merely interjections, or spellings of letters, or foreign units of this, that, and the other?
Yeah, it was a thrill the first time I spelled AX and OX on a triple-letter score for over 50 points as a kid. But with EX and XI and XU to work with, where is the challenge? It happens game after game. A goldfish could do it. And we're not just talking X; most any 3- or 4-point consonant (in particular H, F, W, and Y) is a threat on a dark blue. The 3-letter minimum variant was developed to put a damper on such cheap plays playing such a major role in every Scrabble game.
To nudge the game towards "real" words, whether using the OSPD or a conventional dictionary, it's a simple matter of requiring a 3-letter minimum. All this means is that AT LEAST ONE of the new words formed in a play must be at least 3 letters long; it does NOT place any requirement on the number of tiles played. For instance, simply adding one letter to an existing 2-letter word on the board satisfies the "3-letter minimum" requirement.
Put another way, no play may consist solely of two-letter words.
Let me emphasize that the 3-letter minimum requirement doesn't eliminate any word from potential use. You will still play two-letter words, such as HO, but now you can't just plop it down on triple-letter score two ways for 26-plus points. In one direction, at least, you have to make an honest-to-gosh 3-letter word, like HOT. It's nice seeing a "real" word on every play. You'll feel good about yourself when you have to forgo a mindless play for one that takes a little thought. I believe Scrabble's inventor, Alfred Butts, would approve whole-heartedly. I'm sure he never foresaw how ridiculously powerful the two-letter words would become as point-scorers by themselves. I'll bet the dictionary he used while developing the game had only about two-thirds of the two-letter words my American Heritage has - never mind the craziness in the OSPD.
And . . . the 3-letter minimum rule adds a refreshing challenge to going out, since you have to take it into consideration when you get down to your last few letters!
Mark down February 2008 as the dawn of a new era in Scrabble. Even with all my previous efforts above to nudge the game towards longer words, this is when Scrabble finally broke out of its diapers as an exercise in pushing around baby blocks onto the colored squares into a joyful, full-grown word game for word lovers! I call the innovation Octo Scrabble. Here are the rules.
1. Fill your rack with 8 tiles (instead of 7).
2. Score bonuses for playing 6, 7, or 8 tiles at once, as follows:
Bonuses in Octo Scrabble
Tiles Bonus Play
Played Points called
------ ------ ----------------------------------------
6 20 Baby Bomb, or 6-tiler
7 50 Bingo, or 7-tiler
8 80 Big Bomb, Octo Bomb, or 8-tiler
(And, incidentally, since the rack now has 8 tiles, the requirement on tiles needed in the bag for an exchange is upped to 8.)
Simple as that. You can forgo me stumbling around trying to find the words to convey the joy of Octo Scrabble; try it just once and see if you can ever turn back. But here's what to expect.
Octo Scrabble removes that "all or nothing" aspect of Scrabble in which either you have it or you don't, meaning either a rack with killer tiles or great bingo possibilities vs. a rack which is good for nothing. Octo Scrabble fills in that "no man's land" between high-scoring baby words and 7-tile bingoes. All of a sudden, the game is not weighted so heavily to "having the right goodies at the right time." You won't even need to groan when your opponent drops a brain-dead J, Q, X, or Z word on a triple-letter score while you sit there looking at a rack full of junky one-pointers. Now there's a just-right intermediate reward for a good, solid 6-tile play - a Baby Bomb. Now you can make a solid score with a respectable word made up of that "junk". Now there's an incentive for playing a great, but formerly useless, word like GOATEE from a vowel-heavy rack out in the open, as opposed to "connecting the dots" of the colored squares step by step to fit GOAT onto triple-word score, exactly the same as 20 million other Scrabble players would do, exactly the same as your pet turtle would do.
Casual players for whom playing all seven tiles was a once in a lifetime event, if that, can now experience the thrill of dropping a Bingo Bomb here and there. If you are an old hand at bingoes, now there's the challenge of playing all eight tiles - the Big Bomb. Blammo!!!
The 8th tile cuts the probability of an all-vowel or all-consonant horror rack just about in half. It's only one step up from 7 tiles and will not overwhelm a player with tons of extra options to consider on every turn. I'll admit, when I first heard of people playing with 9 tiles - which is now a suggested variant in the set of rules that comes with Scrabble - I thought two things. First of all, "Kid's stuff!" And secondly, "Holy smokes, it would take me a half an hour to wade through the possibilites of 9 tiles!" Rest assured, there is nothing cheap or silly about 8 tiles, and there is nothing overwhelming about the possibilities. It plays just as fast or faster than the conventional seven.
Octo Scrabble just feels so much better. It's smooth; it flows; it's comfortable. It's like riding a good, 10-speed bike after decades of clunking yourself around on a heavy, old, American 1-speed. (Well, for this analogy, maybe you have to imagine a 10-speed bike with a nice, fat, padded seat and high-riser handlebars.) Try Octo Scrabble and tell me if I'm exaggerating or imagining things. Take a moment to look over the first season's worth Octo Scrabble games ever played.
For 8 tiles you'll want a longer rack than the standard Scrabble rack. I find a one-and-a-half inch (1.5") extension is perfect. If you have extra racks lying around you'll probably be as surprised as I was to find how different the cross sections of racks from different sets are. What I suggest is taking one rack from a set of four and cutting three 1.5" segments from it to glue to the ends of the other three racks. Use a miter box and Elmer's Wood Glue.
Only very recently (writing in February 2008) was I alerted to the existence of Super Scrabble. A bit of research on the web showed straight away that Super Scrabble is not for me. It charges headlong in the opposite direction from where I'm going. With its new outer rows jam-packed with premium squares, including quadruple-letter and quadruple-word scores, Super Scrabble places even greater emphasis on Scrabble's worn-out, OSPD baby words. Why even worry your brain with bingoes when you can make 50-point plays blindfolded with any F, H, W, or Y? Never mind 100-point plays with the J, Q, X, and Z . . . What's a crummy 50-point bingo bonus worth, anyhow, when players score up in the 800s in a game?
But those extra three rows on all sides of a conventional Scrabble board - now that got me thinking of all the times I couldn't get a play down just because I "ran out of road!" Wouldn't it be nice to be able to blast right through the border? Why not? It would open things up without altering the essence of Scrabble in any way - unless you take it as a fundamental principle that everyone has to scrounge around playing off a tile or two at a time when the board gets crowded. Wouldn't it be nice to be zinging 4-, 5-, and 6-tile plays right to the end of the game?
These are the rules for Extended-board Scrabble.
Procure a Super Scrabble board, but ignore all premium values shown in the outer three rows and columns. All squares in the outer three rows and columns (the "perimeter") are single-valued. The perimeter is only for letting words extend past the edge of the familiar, 15x15 board (the "main" board); the perimeter is for overflow only. Every play is still pegged to the main board, meaning that every play must include at least one tile that connects to a tile previously played on the main board. Naturally, any tiles that touch in the perimeter must form valid words, crossword-style, and those words will figure in the score.
Put the other way around, you cannot make a play wholly in the perimeter; you cannot extend a word that stops at the edge of the main board into the perimeter. You will see that no word can ever extend into any of the 3x3 blocks at the corners of the board. In fact, you might want to slice a diagonal off of each corner to make the oversized board a bit more rotation-friendly.
Until you get a Super Scrabble board, you can play Extended-board Scrabble quite comfortably on the standard cardboard Scrabble board, at least for two-player games. When you play into the "perimeter" some tiles will have to fall just off the board, on the table top. That makes turning the board impracticable. The solution is just to position the board and yourselves so that you're both looking at the board from a slight angle and you never have to move the board. I know anybody who took it that far could have figured that out; but I just wanted to make sure nobody feels like you can't play Extended-board Scrabble without a Super Scrabble board. In fact, the first Extended-board Scrabble games ever played were on the board from my set with the 1949 copyright!
Quickly now, here's a rundown of the recommendations discussed above.
- Good words only (no-risk challenge).
- Conventional dictionary.
- Word lists
- Two-letter word list available to everyone.
- List of disallowed OSPD words (assuming any player is familiar with the OSPD.)
- Mixing of 3 sets of tiles.
- 3-letter minimum.
- Octo Scrabble
- Extended-board Scrabble
Requiring good words brings Scrabble into line with other games and sports where you are only rewarded for doing something right. It pulls the rug out from under bluffers.
A conventional dictionary makes Scrabble more vocabulary-based. If you go with the American Heritage, I've done the word list legwork for you.
All players must be armed with the same set of two-letter words.
The disallowed word list makes it possible to have good games between players of widely varying Scrabble experience.
Drawing about 110 tiles from a mixture of 3 sets of tiles makes every game fresh and different.
The 3-letter minimum is the first and most important step in getting Scrabble away from those high-scoring, tiny word, trash plays. Good riddance.
The 8-tile rack and modest bonus for a 6-tile play in Octo Scrabble smooth out the unenjoyable "all or nothing" aspect of Scrabble. It's great to see nice, long words flying all over the board.
Extended-board Scrabble is the final step in giving nice, long words their head in Scrabble - to the very end of the game, even.
Note that of all the recommendations here, the bonus for a 6-tile Baby Bomb is the only one that does not fall within the Scrabble box top rules or emerge naturally by removing some constraint which exists because of a need to "draw the line" somewhere. You couldn't expect the makers to supply hundreds of tiles just so the players can scoop out a fresh batch every game. Alfred Butts himself considered at least a 17x17 board. It's no wonder it took almost 60 years for a company to tackle the production and marketing problems associated with the Super Scrabble board. The Baby and Big Bomb bonuses are something "new" but, still, you have to agree they extrapolate nicely from the bonus for a 7-tile play. That, by the way, was one of James Brunot's innovations, not part of Alfred Butts' original rules. I view the Baby Bomb bonus as correcting an oversight. And it stands to reason the bonus for an 8-tile Big Bomb should be proportionately greater.
These suggestions are all independent from each other. You could try one; you can try a couple; you can try them all together. For me, there's no going back on any one of them. A conventional tournament-style game against a bluffer using an OSPD and the predictable 100-tile set without being sure of the 2-letter words and no intermediate ground between a junk rack and a bingo rack? You can have it. Count me out.
If there is ever any appreciable movement away from tournament-style Scrabble towards the vocabulary-based Scrabble proposed here, let me propose a name for all of these recommendations combined - Transcendental Scrabble. Thus, the Transcendental Scrabble experience derives from good words only; conventional dictionary; two-letter word list; disallowed OSPD word list; mixed set of tiles; 3-letter minimum; 8-tile rack; stepped bonuses for bombs of 6, 7, and 8 tiles; and an extended board. View the first ever Transcendental Scrabble boards. They are breathtaking!
Didn't get enough? I don't blame you. Here is our second season of Transcendental Scrabble boards.
Better yet, see our games from the start of the next season placed side-by-side with games from the final round of the 2008 National Scrabble Championship. Whew!
After that, anything will be a comedown, but here are the first ever Octo Scrabble boards, incorporating all of the guidelines in this page except for the extended board. They should still look pretty amazing compared to boards produced by tournament-style play.
Finally, you can take a look at game boards produced by using all of the suggestions in this page prior to the Octo and Extended-board innovations; in other words, all of the suggestions played on a conventional board with a conventional 7-tile rack. Now they look pretty tame compared to the Octo and Extended-board games, but remain, nonetheless, on a whole different plane from tournament-style boards. If nothing else, note the scarcity of cheap OSPD junk on the boards, and the refreshing variation in letter distribution from game to game. Here are Scrabble boards from the season 1 of the Dover Scrabble Club. Here are Scrabble boards from season 2.
I have another page with a few more Scrabble thoughts and giving a few Scrabble variants such as Bingo Bop, Phone Scrabble, and One Point Per Tile Scrabble.
You might also want to visit my page of Dover Scrabble Club rules to see the ideas presented here tightened up into an actual set of rules, suitable for implementation in your own play.
Word Freak is an impressive job, maybe even amazing. How in the world could someone crank out a 372-page book on Scrabble that more or less lives up to the reproduced blurbs: can't-put-it-down narrative; marvelously absorbing; impassioned; thoughtful, winning; etc. Bob Costas summed it up: "Scrabble. Who knew?"
But they forgot to mention: no fun; disgusting; revolting; no missed opportunity to rub an obscenity in the reader's face; America's most beloved board game befouled by a bunch of slimy worms; like sitting down to Mark Twain and getting the Godfather. I doubt I'll ever feel clean again. As an English player said about the Americans: "I can't imagine being any of them."
Sordidness aside, it's hard to imagine anyone not already brainwashed into the cult of tournament Scrabble not coming away from the book with a feeling of serious Scrabble being a perfectly ridiculous activity. Scrabble was invented as a word game, but you'd have to look mighty hard at a tournament Scrabble board to find anything to do with one's spoken, written, listening, or reading vocabulary - no matter how intelligent or educated, or how much of a word lover, you are.
Early on, Fatsis tells about watching a game between two experts that seems to be in a "foreign language." He reports that there are devoted Scrabble players, even, who think more people would join up if the dictionary "didn't include so many strange or obsolete words." How could they not?
A top player says, "It's very frustrating to me that we have not yet managed to develop an audience for the game." Gee, I wonder why that is. This player's own brother points out (112 pages later) that a tournament Scrabble board "would look like Greek to its prospective audience."
The list of valid Scrabble words for international play is called SOWPODS. Players opposed to SOWPODS say that its supporters are "a handful of elitist snob experts who play in the world championships and are trying to ram 40,000 ridiculous words down the throats of the masses." I second that. Or, I would if it mattered. All my Scrabbling is with a conventional dictionary, and I don't see any signs of an apostasy on the horizon.
Fatsis states, "It's just about impossible to play high-level (or even low-level) competitive Scrabble if you're hung up on the game's use of odd words." His saving grace there is the hedge, "just about". I offer myself as living proof that there is no problem whatsoever playing competitive Scrabble with a conventional dictionary. None.
American tournament rules allow bluffing, and so a bluffing game Scrabble has become. Whoopee. Fatsis reports on some of the highest scoring Scrabble games. A Chicago player scored 792 - "but he used four phony bingos." A Cincinnati student scored 724 - "but his opponent was an 83-year-old newcomer... who let him get away with five phonies."
How can anyone write that or read that without turning all shades of red with embarrassment? Where else in all of our competitive sports and games is there anything like it? Did Babe Ruth get credit for home runs by striking out? Did he rack up his home runs in sanctioned games with kiddies and grannies and a 150-foot fence?
Here's one of the author's own anecdotes from a tournament: "I open with a deliberate phony, MEAOW. On her next turn, she takes the bait, pluralizing the fake word, and I challenge that off the board and gain a turn... At the next table, one of the old-timers watches the sequence. 'You've become one of us,' she says." Sounds like too much fun to me; guess I'll never be "one of them."
In another passage, a former top-rated player explains why he quit Scrabble. He objected to having to play inferior players, from whom he had almost nothing to gain, rating-wise, and everything to lose. "Given this environment, one must play phonies... to steal games that are seemingly out of reach." In other words, if he were constrained to playing real words, he would lose now and then. Excuse me while a grapefruit-sized tear rolls down my cheek.
You know from my Scrabble pages what I think of phonies. If that asinine component of Scrabble were eliminated, Fatsis' book could have been half as thick. And maybe a reader or two might have come away thinking, "Hey, this Scrabble, it could be a pretty neat game!"
Actually, world competition uses the free challenge rule, what I call "no-risk challenge" (or simply "double-checking"). In one game a player challenges ZAMIAS, a baby word for the pros. He's accused of "buying some time to think." Fatsis declares, "It's one of the perils of the free challenge rule." Somehow, in the other 371 pages of the book, he forgets to list any of the other "perils" of such a lame-brain rule, which, by the way, was the box-top rule until 1976. Hmmm, mid-1970s . . . tournament Scrabble emerging . . . Who tricked or strong-armed Selchow & Righter into changing the box-top, and thereby turning Scrabble into a barroom bluff game after 25 years of class?
If Fatsis recognizes the two-letter words as anything more significant in Scrabble play than teensy words, he doesn't let on. He writes near the beginning, "Armed with the two- and (most of the) three-letter words, I can now beat casual players handily." I should say so. And armed with an AK-47 you can beat a guy with a water pistol at 20 paces. Handily. The two-letter words are the game's basic equipment, the tools. If Scrabble were a brick wall, the two-letter words are the mortar. Any game in which a player is not "armed" with all the acceptable two-letter words is a meaningless exercise, a total waste of everybody's time.
Fatsis counts the K among the power tiles. People in my former scrabble club did the same. I don't get it. It's nowhere near the category of the J, X, Q, and Z. Any one of those tiles played on a triple-letter score, all by itself, nothing else, would score 24 or 30 points. That's far greater than the average points per turn of a very good player (using a conventional dictionary). The K would score a piddly 15 points. That's about equal to the average points per turn of the weakest novice in a Scrabble club. The K - you can have it.
Fatsis made use of a funny little word, pesty, in his text. Twice, even. This was not a word in the original OSPD, a concoction of five major dictionaries (supposedly). Back then, if anyone accidentally said "pesty", he was really trying to say "pestiferous". But it sounds so right that PESTY was always popping up on Scrabble boards. I wonder if it became a real word somewhere along the line largely because Scrabblers willed it.
Worth the price of admission was the chapter on the inventor of Scrabble, Alfred Butts, and the man who put the finishing touches on it (including the name), James Brunot. Now there's a classy story! The chapter stands out like an enchanted isle in the middle of an ocean of sewage.
It disappoints me greatly that Scrabble players are ranked according a "rating" with an obscure and complicated calculation. I trust it shows where the players stand relative to each other, but what sort of absolute meaning does it have? If there's some reason not to simply calculate average Points Per Turn (PPT), it eludes me. What makes PPT perfectly valid is that you always play the same number of turns as your opponent, on the average. It's insensitive to opponent, except maybe in the far-fetched case of collusion. And how long can you hope to go around playing the same chum who blithely spends his life setting you up? To be the best player, you have to be able to wring out a fraction of a point more per play than anyone else. Period.
If somebody calculated these guys' average points per turn, I would have an idea how I compare. But since their scores are so affected by the arbitrary 50-point bingo bonus, I'd also be interested in a Base Points Per Turn statistic, without the bonuses added in, and a separate Bonus Points Per Turn statistic. Added together, they would give the Total Points Per Turn for a player. Notice that the Bonus PPT is easily convertible into another interesting statistic, Mean Turns Between Bingoes. (For example, if a player's Bonus PPT is 5.0, then he must average one bingo every ten plays.) If you say, "But they throw away a lot of points in order to make bingoes!", I say, so do I.
I wish I had enough money to run a major tournament using my club rules: a conventional dictionary; good words only; 3-letter minimum; and tiles dispensed to the players from a drum with a mixture of a hundred sets. Now that would be fun to watch and play along with. Just think, all those guys who spent years memorizing tens upon tens of thousands of official Scrabble letter combinations having to downshift to a real dictionary to go for the biggest Scrabble pot ever offered! Heeheehee. The winner might even be a reasonably smart, regular person.
Fatsis observed: "Recruiting new players is Scrabble's toughest task." No mystery there; just read the book. He gives 372 pages of reasons.
When I wrote the penultimate paragraph above, I was indulging a flight of fancy. Then it started hitting me, "Why not? . . . why not?" I sent an email to Houghton Mifflin, the publishers of my American Heritage dictionary, suggesting they could get some wonderful, and cheap, advertising, and help to get Scrabble back on track as a people's word game, if they sponsored a Scrabble tournament using their fine dictionary. I kind of knew in advance what the response might be, and it turned out my suspicion was right on.
Jul 24 2007
Mr. Sauter,
Thank you for your suggestion of an American Heritage Scrabble Tournament.
Although we agree that this is an interesting and thoughtful idea, Scrabble
has an arrangement with another Dictionary company, and so American
Heritage would not be able to hold Scrabble events as a result.
I am very pleased to find that American Heritage has been a source of help
to you, and I hope it continues to serve you well in the future. Best of
luck with your Scrabble tournaments.
Best regards,
Sarah Iani
Dictionary Editorial Department
Houghton Mifflin Company
(Actually, I wasn't expecting a response even that thoughtful and polite. Thanks, Sarah!)
Now, there may be many other good reasons why such an idea would never come off, but what sort of screwy world have we created where some agreement made between two parties, Scrabble and Merriam-Webster, applies to everybody else - who aren't any sort of party to the agreement? Can Scrabble really kick down my door and have me arrested for using something other than the "official" Merriam-Webster dictionary? What about their own box-top rule number 8: "Before the game begins, players should agree upon the dictionary they will use."
Any other dictionary maker out there with a nice collegiate edition who wants to take up the good fight? Are the Scrabble people really that simple-minded that they can't see how a bunch of come-one-come-all tournaments with down-to-earth dictionaries would send their own profits sky-rocketing? In any case, when they try to hassle you, all you have to do is take Rule 8 with you all the way to the Supreme Court.
i just read your Scrabble page and think that perhaps had i read it a year ago, i would still be with my fiancee. she loved Scrabble and so did i. i also play a lot of poker and at the time was playing a lot of Magic: TG. we played by the standard rules and in no time my bluffing style started to be a constant source of friction to the point where we no longer played. you see, with my old roommates, bluffing was part and parcel of the game, even the point of some games. we were also old poker hands so this is not surprising. anyways, she and I played fewer and fewer games and then broke up. Moral: don't bluff your sweetheart and use the no-risk challenge rule. Next time I'll remember this. Damn, do you know how hard it is to find a girl in her 20s who likes boardgames? you'd think it was easy but of the 4 serious girlfriends i've had (i'm 28), 3 of them HATED board games. anyhoo, thanks again for your page...i'll keep it bookmarked for the next one.
Pete
Reading your comments about the sad state of Scrabble was like wandering in a foreign land for years and suddenly stumbling on a compatriot. (I disagree in some details, but that's not important).
To introduce myself, I gave up tournament Scrabble shortly after participating in the Vegas Tournament of Champions (I'm the bald-headed guy in the 4th row in the Sports Illustrated aerial shot). The reason I quit, despite a 1950 rating, was disgust at the way the Scrabble Assn, which is simply the mouthpiece of the game's manufacturers, kept jacking players around with piddling changes in the allowable words.
The way the wind was blowing, I sensed that it was just a matter of time before SOWPODS [a combination of the American OSPD and the British OSW, Official Scrabble Words] became universal, which would mean that a non-dictionary dictionary, Chambers (really an encyclopedia, not a dictionary) would become the authority for all North American players, with the result that monstrosities like QI and JA would suddenly become allowable. Obviously the experts want this to happen; they wouldn't have to learn and unlearn thousands of words every time they entered a tournament.
My hopes lie in the other direction: we should throw out foreign currencies, Scottish dialect, the umpteen variations on Yiddishisms like GANEF and buzz words that have a shelf life of 2 or 3 years. Wait till they've been around for a while before we accept them. (Apparently that's what happened with FRABJOUS. It became good for OSPD2, more than 100 years after it was coined as a nonsense word by Lewis Carroll in "Through the Looking Glass". How did it suddenly become acceptable?)
A recent cover story of the Scrabble newsletter shows how derelict we've become in allowing tone-deaf people to decide the fates of words. It tells of the attempts to include LOLLAPALOOZA, meaning an outdoor concert series, as an acceptable word. Apparently the editors are too young, or too dense, to realize that the word already exists, and has since the turn of the century, under a different meaning. [End Lundegaard.]
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Helpful keywords not in the main text: g.i. joel sherman; larry sherman; nick ballard; bill blevins; brian capelletto; ron tiekert; mark nyman; long word scrabble (a name I used for about 2 days before settling on octo scrabble); XBoard Scrabble (a discarded early name for Extended-board Scrabble.)
Thanks to Peter Roizen, the creator of WildWords, for the great "bomb" terminology. Peter and I have attacked the vapidness of standard Scrabble from completely opposite directions. His brainstorm to take Scrabble away from the lists of short, inscrutable letter sequences and into a richer realm of long words - the longest you know, even - was to introduce wildcards into the game. The wildcard * behaves as it does in familiar electronic searches - it stands for a string of letters. All of a sudden, you can play 20-letter words; the sky, or supercalifragilisticexpialadocious, is the limit! If you think of it later, search the web for "wildwords" (one word). His pokes at tournament-style Scrabble are funny!
Parents, if you're considering tutoring or supplemental education for your child, you may be interested in my observations on Kumon.