Shrewd Scrabble Facts Mental Floss. To celebrate National Scrabble Daycommemorated on April 1. Alfred Mosher Buttshere are a few fun facts about the game and the competitions it has inspired. SCRABBLE WAS INVENTED BY AN ARCHITECT. In 1. 93. 3, New York City architect Alfred Mosher Butts created an early version of the game we know as Scrabble. To determine how many tiles there should be and how many points each letter should be worth, he calculated letter frequency on the front page of The New York Times. So, for example, Q is a letter that occurs least often in English text, so it should be a letter that there is only one tile of, and that tile should be worth 1. John Chew, the co president of the North American Scrabble Players Association NASPA. IT WASNT ALWAYS CALLED SCRABBLE. Getty Images. Butts named his game Lexico, then changed the name to Criss Cross Words. His friend and eventual business partner James Brunot came up with the name Scrabble in the late 1. INITIALLY, NO GAME MANUFACTURERS WOULD BUY SCRABBLE. How to Play Scrabble. Scrabble is a fun, classic word game. The object of the game is to get the most points by playing words on a board that you connect. Hasbro. Butts made the games himself in his garage with Brunots help, says Chris Cree, co president of NASPA. Around 1. 95. 7, the president of Macys saw a game or became familiar with one and placed a huge order that Brunot and Butts couldnt really fill, Cree says. Butts had to sell it to Brunot, who had to sell it to Selchow and Righter, who were the manufacturers of the game when I started playing. And they held it until they sold it to Coleco Industries, which sold it to Hasbro. DESPITE ITS LONG HISTORY, SCRABBLE HASNT CHANGED MUCH. Johnscabin Slang is a dictionary of slang, webspeak, made up words, and colloquialisms. Browse our listings, or submit your own slang words to our site. Play virtual Scrabble online with a chat room facility. Two, three and four player games can be played, and all games can be continued at your leisure, enjoy Links to Scrabble rules and Scrabble official game instructions. Two to four players play in any game of Scrabble. The object of Scrabble is to score more points. Getty ImagesThe previous squares are exactly what they were when I first started offthe same 1. Cree says. Thats something pretty neat about the game. It hasnt changed one iota and its still popular. Still, there are crazy variations that people play, including one called Clabbers. Thats the anagram of Scrabble, Cree says. You can play words in any order you want to and play the letters in any order you want to as long as the letters can make an anagram of a word. BUT THE GAME MIGHT NOT STAY THE SAME FOR MUCH LONGER. There was some controversy recently over whether or notgiven how much the nature of the game has changed based on the expansion of its playing lexicon in the 6. Chew says. To be specific, there was a major change in the strategy in the game when the word qat was introduced, I think in the 1. Playing the game before you had either of these words as options, if you got the Q, you were pretty much stuck with it until you got a U. And even then, you werent sure you could score a lot with it. So we would think that whoever got the Q on average was going to get 1. Now the Q is a much less negative tile to hold on to, so there are some people who think it should be worth 8 points instead of 1. YOU CAN USE THE WORD BINGO WHILE PLAYING. Getty Images. When players use all seven of their Scrabble tiles to make a word, its called a bingo. Scrabble-Crossword-Game-0.jpg' alt='Scrabble Rules Two Double Word Squares' title='Scrabble Rules Two Double Word Squares' />Yell it out to confuse your opponent NASPA USES DIFFERENT TILES FOR COMPETITION. Charles GoldsteinNASPAIf you reach your hand in a bag of wooden set of tiles, you can kind of feel what doesnt have anything on it and know its a blank, Cree says. We play with smooth tiles to make sure no one can Braille anything. THERE ARE DIFFERENT WORD LISTS FOR DIFFERENT LEVELS OF COMPETITION. Getty Images. If youre playing at the school level, the competitive level, or the international level, NASPA has different lists. Those are all sort of inclusively nested so that you just have to learn more words as you get on and on to a higher level, Chew says. The nature of the vocabulary changesif youre playing at a school level, youre not allowed to play words that could possibly cause offense, even if used in the most polite situations. If youre playing at an adult level, youre supposed to be able to play any word a well read college educated person should have seen in print in some way. And then if you want to compete at an international level, you have to memorize things like misprints in Shakespearian manuscripts and Syrian texts, names of various obscure animals and plants from around the world and words in Indian and things like that. THE GAME IS PLAYED COMPETITIVELY IN OTHER LANGUAGESWHICH CAN MAKE THINGS COMPLICATED. Getty Images. Chew says he thinks the game is best played in English, though, for a number of reasons. Some of the aspects of the board and the rules in terms in the spacing of the bonus tiles and the way you build words is best utilized in English, he says. For instance, in French, its a little bit too easy to make words because most French words they can stick an E or an S at the end of so, every time you make a word, your opponent just sticks more letters and gets more points. Its kind of frustrating that way everyone scores more points overall. German Scrabble players have the opposite problem, Chew says its hard to turn an existing German word into a longer German word, which creates a looser word gridand led to a debate about whether they should use the standard seven tiles or up it to eight. There was a substantial body of players who felt that there are relatively few words that are interesting in German that are less than eight letters long, he says. Theres no point to playing with just seven letters. Eventually, the dispute was resolved, and today, Germans play with seven letters, just like the rest of the world does. There are also tiles specific to certain countries. In Spanish, theres a single tile that has two Ls on it, Chew says. Or Catalan, which has two Ls with a dot in between it, or Dutch, which has an I and a J on it that look a little bit odd to our eyes. Professional linguists have determined the values of those tiles. Play Bingo Luau, casino games and other free games online at Pogo. NASPAS RULE BOOK IS 5. Blog Link Generator. PAGES LONG. Getty ImagesBasically every rule that you look at is a result of someone coming up with a weird interpretation or weird situation, Chew says. If two games are happening at one table, they try to use different colored tiles so they dont get mixed up although that sometimes still happens. Each player has 2. And theres computer adjudication of words, too. THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW SCANDALS. Charles GoldsteinNASPABefore players start a game, they lay out the 1. Sometimes you run across a column that is just so plainly stupid and written in bad faith that its hard to muster the indignation necessary to give it a proper. Lexulous is compared to Scrabble all the time due to many similarities. The game grid is the same size, the game rules are pretty much the same, and the original name. Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles bearing a single letter onto a board divided into a 1515 grid of squares. A guide to the game of Scrabble focused on teaching people who are new to the game how to play. A tutorial covering the basics. Star Vs The Forces Of Evil Web Dl. One player, says Cree, allegedly saw the blanks and made sure to pick them out and hide them under his leg. Various times during the game he would introduce them from underneath his leg to his rack, he says. He was suspected first year of doing so, and it was reported he drew both blanks in 2. The next year, people were looking for him and he was caught. Theres also something Chew referred to as the strip search incident, which occurred during a world championship. In the world championship, we get a huge cultural divide between the way the people play Scrabble in different countries, he says. The rules are slightly different around the world, and definitely the etiquette is different around the world. In this particular incident, a Thai player was facing off against a British player. It was near the end of the game to the point where there were few enough tiles in the bag that they were keeping track of all the tiles they didnt play, all the tiles that were sitting in front of them on their rack, and tried to figure out what tiles were still in play and work out all the possibilities and maximize their score regardless of what tiles were in the bag, Chew says. Scrabble Rules How to Play Scrabble. Links to Scrabble rules and Scrabble official game. Two to four players play in any game of Scrabble. The object of. Scrabble is to score more points than ones opponent. A player. collects points by placing words on the game board. Each letter has. a different point value, so the strategy becomes to play words with. The Scrabble Board. A Scrabble game board is made of up cells in a square grid. The. Scrabble board is 1. The Scrabble tiles. Scrabble Tiles. Scrabble. These blank tiles add a. Scrabble. The blanks substitute for any letter in. Once played, a blank tile remains for the remainder of. Various letters have different point values, depending on the. Blank tiles. have no point value. Tile Values. Here are the point values for each letter in Scrabble. Points Blank tile. Point A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T and U. Points D and G. Points B, C, M and P. Points F, H, V, W and Y. Points K. 8 Points J and X. Points Q and Z. Extra Point Values. Some squares on the Scrabble board represent multipliers. If a. tile is placed on this square, then the tiles value is multiplied. Certain tiles multiply the point. Double Letter Scores Light blue cells are found isolated. When a tile is placed on this space, that tiles point. Triple Letter Score This is a dark blue cell on the. Scrabble. The tile placed on this square has its points multiplied. Double Word Score Light red cells are found running. When a player. plays a word on one of these squares, the point value of the entire. Triple Word Score This is a dark red square on the. Scrabble board. These are found on the four sides of the board. When a word is. played using this square, then the points for the word are. One Single Use Note that extra point squares are only. If one player plays a word using this cells, then the. Starting the Game. Without looking into the tile bag, each of the Scrabble players. Whichever player has the letter. A blank tile is. considered better than an A. These tiles are placed into the bag. Starting the game, each player begins their turn by drawing seven. The player can do one of three things on. The player can place a word, exchange tiles or pass. Most of. the time, the player will take the option of playing a word. Exchanging tiles allows a player to replace anywhere between one. If this option is taken. Therefore, a tile. A player may pass at any time. If all players pass twice in a. The First Word Score. A player begins the game by placing a word on the star square at. This star acts as a double word score. The. star cell does not act as a double word score for subsequent players. Play continues in a clockwise direction around the Scrabble. Replacing Scrabble Tiles. When a player places tiles on the Scrabble board, that player. The player must not look at the tiles when. Tile selection is usually done by holding the bag. The Fifty Point Bonus. When a player is able to place all seven tiles from the tile rack. In end game scenarios, when the players hold less than the. The End of a Scrabble Game. When all of the tiles have been taken from the bag and one player. Tallying Scrabble Scores. Once the game has ended, each player counts the points on the. Each player has that number. The player who ended the game and who therefore has no more tiles. Add the total of all points of. This number is. added to the final score of the player who is out of tiles. The Scrabble player with the highest score after all final scores. Accepted Scrabble Words. Players may place any word which can be found in a standard. English language dictionary. Official Scrabble dictionaries also can. Types of words which cannot be used are abbreviations, prefixes. Words that require a hyphen or an apostrophe cannot be. Words that are spelled with a capital letter cannot be used. Generally speaking in an English language game of Scrabble. Scrabble board. If those words. English dictionary, then the word is allowable. This is because the word is spoken often enough by native. English speakers that it has become a part of the English language.