Snatch-words

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Snatch-words is a board-free Scrabble variant.

[edit] Rules

Snatch-words is the predecessor of the game grabscrab. This game does not use the blank tiles, so these must first be removed.

To begin, all the tiles from the standard Scrabble game are placed face down in the middle of the table. Taking turns around the table, each player turns over one tile, placing it in clear view of all players. A player who sees a Scrabble-valid word calls it out, takes the letters, and makes the word in front of her.

From then on each player may use letters from the "unused" pile or whole words from any player (which must all be used together, whether rearranged or not) to call out new words. However, any new word must be longer than any of its components, so simple anagrams are not allowed.

Often, two players will call out new words at, or near, the same time. The player whose call-out is discernibly first gets the word, though someone else can immediately afterwards call out a longer word if they see it, using those letters and one or more others. If the players truly cannot agree who made a call-out first, then the new letter that provoked it is turned over and reshuffled back into the pile.

At the end, each player's collection of individual words is scored Scrabble-style, though naturally, as there is no board, there are no double-word scoring tiles or similar point-modifiers.

A very similar game has been commercialized by Portobello Games under the name Snatch.[1]