I don't like Scrabble much. It's for various reasons. I feel like the game has a lot more to do with manipulating the space on the board and preventing others from doing things than it is about finding cool words that fit together. Basically, Scrabble with anyone who's any good at it more of a strategyless strategy game than it is a word finding game (like, say, Boggle) and I find it deteriorating into waiting for your turn only to have your hopes at using that long word dashed and spelling "id" instead, even though you don't know what it means.
Enter Speed Scrabble.
How to Play
Grab your Scrabble set and dump all the pieces face down in the center of the table or surface where you will be playing. You don't need the board; each player just creates his own structure in front of him.
- Each player takes seven tiles and keeps them face down in front of them.
- When everyone is ready to go, players flip their tiles face up and try to create a single structure using all of their letters. Rules for what words and placements are valid are the same as in regular Scrabble.
- When one player has used all his words he says "Done" and everyone takes another tile which they use to add on to their own structure until someone says "Done" again.
- When someone says "Done" and there are not enough tiles left for all players to receive one, play ends and everyone counts their score.
- Like Scrabble, players score for each word so some letters might be scored twice. Every letter not attached to the structure counts against the player. Each illegal word counts double its score against the player.
Advantages
Turns in Scrabble are a necessary evil. On the plus side, since you don't interact with your opponents during their turns, you can go to the fridge or talk to nonplayers while everyone else is going. Speed Scrabble is ideal for a party situation where folks are looking for less of a time investment (about 7 minutes), any number of players (you can combine Scrabble sets) and high action all the time (no turns).
4 comments:
Did we tell you about this?? Azure and I thought we invented it. Normal Scrabble is never the same after playing for speed...
Oh - I read the rules a little closer and apparently we didn't teach it to you.
In our version of Speed Scrable, there are no turns - one person goes first, then it's all-out. When you get a word, you say it, and the first person to have said their word gets claim to the space if there's a conflict.
You can have up to 7 tiles in your thing at a time, no swapping.
Double word/letter scores count for ALL tiles using that square, regardless of who used it first. (in other words, if you play Texas and I play Aires off of it, and the double word score is under the A, then it counts for both of us.)
You have to write down your words to keep track of them, then after all the tiles have been played you find your words and add up the scores.
Hi Nathan,
Just to let you (and your readers) know that you can now play Speed Scrabble Online, at Supernifty - hurrah!
Regards,
Peter
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