Scrabble variants
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Scrabble variants are games created by changing the normal Scrabble rules or equipment.
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[edit] Variants with standard board and/or tiles
[edit] Clabbers
Clabbers is the best known variant to tournament Scrabble players. All of the rules are identical to Scrabble with one exception: words played only have to be anagrams of real words. For example, MPORCTEU is a valid play in Clabbers because it anagrams to COMPUTER. The increased ability to play parallel to pre-existing words makes for much higher scores. Knowing all of the two letter words is very helpful in this game.
[edit] Category Scrabble
This is a family of games in which you can play words belonging to a category that aren't allowed in regular Scrabble. This can be used to handicap a game between players of different skill, for instance Pokémon Scrabble for a parent/child game. For a real challenge, only words in a given category are allowed. It is best to pick a large and varied category so that the game doesn't become too slow paced with frequent exchanges.
[edit] Duplicate
A neutral official draws 7 letters to start the game. He announces these letters to the players who draw the same letters from their pool. The players now have a fixed time limit to find the highest scoring word. At the end of time, runners collect slips of paper on which the players have written their word (word, score and placement) and the official announces the highest scoring play which the players will now place on their own board. The official draws new tiles to make the total number up to seven, and the game continues until either there are no more consonants or no more vowels. At the end of the game, the player with the most points wins the game. There is no limit to the number of players that can participate in the same duplicate game. The official record for participation in France where duplicate is the preferred form of the game is 1485 at the 1998 tournament in Vichy.
[edit] External link
Duplicate Scrabble Rules as played in Toronto, Canada (from poslfit.com)
[edit] Grabscrab
This is a version of anagrams played with 100 or 200 Scrabble tiles. The tiles start face down. Each player turns the tiles over one at a time until one player is able to form a word. The player with the most words at the end of the game wins. The catch is that players may "steal" a word from another player (or add the letter themselves) by taking additional turned over letters and adding them to words already flipped over. An example would be taking "quit" and making it "quiet".
[edit] Anti-Scrabble
Anti-Scrabble - or Alt-Scrabble, as it is known in some quarters - requires the use of all that is disallowed in standard Scrabble (not including made-up words or random letters), including proper nouns, acronyms, all foreign words (foreign relative to the language of the Scrabble set being used), expressive noises such as "nooooo" and "mwoohahaha", and abbreviations. In the case of acronyms, one must declare what it is one is referring to, and in the case of a challenge, if the declared acronym is not found but another acronym using the same letters is found, that particular combination of letters is nonetheless disallowed. This is to prevent the practice of "acronym fishing" in which one puts down a random letter combination in the hopes that it will be found to be a legitimate acronym (most combinations of 2 or 3 letters turn out to be actual acronyms).
[edit] Solitaire Scrabble
Solitaire Scrabble follows the same rules and word acceptability as normal Scrabble, but there is only one player. It can be played against a clock, trying to get the most points in three minutes for example, or for highest maximum score. Trying to set yourself up for a good play on the next turn is a good way to learn what not to do in a normal Scrabble game, as not you but your opponent will most likely reap the benefit of opening something up.
[edit] Scrabble Towers
A player may play letters on top of letters that are already on the board, even noncontiguously, as long as all letters placed in one turn are in the same row or column, and no more than half (rounded down) cover up pre-existing letters. For example, the words DAWN and IT, with one space between them, can be changed to the single word DABBLING by covering up the W, N, and T, but cannot be changed to the word DECOYING because more than half of the letters in DAWN would have to be covered up. Scoring is the same as Scrabble; zero points are scored for tiles covered up. The concept of building upwards was implemented in a commercially released game called Upwords.
[edit] Anagrams
Anagrams, also referred to as Snatch-words, is played without a board. Tiles are placed face down in the middle of the table. Taking turns around the table, each player will turn over a tile, leaving it in clear view of all players. A player who sees a Scrabble-valid word calls it out, takes the letters, and lays the word out in front of themselves. From then on each player may take letters from the "unused" pile or whole words from any player to call out new words. At the end each player's collection of individual words is scored.
[edit] Take Two
Take Two is played without a board. Tiles are placed face down in the middle of the table. Players draw from these communal letters trying to build words with their personal tiles in front of them. Words can be built by rearranging tiles already there and by playing through pre-existing words as if they were playing Solitaire Scrabble. If a player plays all of the tiles in front of them, they call "Take two", and everybody takes two tiles. Play continues until there are no more tiles left to draw. Take One or Take Four can also be played.
[edit] Speed Scrabble
Speed Scrabble is Scrabble played with a considerably shorter clock limit (e.g. 5 minutes), than normal tournament Scrabble.
[edit] External link
[edit] Strategy Scrabble
Strategy Scrabble is a two player variation. Both players can see their opponent's rack. This allows players to develop more situational strategies based on their opponent's rack.
[edit] Team Speed Scrabble
Team Speed Scrabble is when teams of 2, 3, or 4 race to play legal Scrabble words as quickly as possible. Scoring does not matter; all that matters is how quickly words are played.
[edit] No Plural Scrabble
No Plural Scrabble follows the standard rules of Scrabble, with the exception that a tile is only worth points when it is first played. For example, a player could play PAT, receiving five points. Another player could make PATENT from PAT, but would only receive points for ENT.
[edit] Ecological Scrabble
So called because in it the blank tiles are recycled. If a blank tile is played to represent a particular letter, a player before his turn can pick up the blank and replace it by the letter that it represents. E.g. if on the board is LO*D, stated to represent LOAD, a player who has a A can pick up the blank and replace it by his A. But he cannot replace the blank by another letter to produce e.g. LOUD or LORD.
[edit] Variants with non-standard equipment
[edit] Super Scrabble
This game has the same rules and tiles as Scrabble, but the board is larger (21x21 vs. 15x15 in the original). With the larger board there are more premium squares, going up to quadruple letter and quadruple word scores. There are also twice as many tiles with a slightly different distribution.
[edit] Upwords
Upwords is played on a special 10x10 board with no premium squares. It has a Qu tile instead of Q and a different tile distribution than regular Scrabble. All tiles, with the exception of the Qu tile in certain circumstances, are worth the same. Words can be formed as in Scrabble as well as by playing on top of previously formed words. All words that are on the first level receive doubled points. Stacks can't go higher than five tiles. When playing over a word, at least one tile from the original word must be incorporated into the new word.
[edit] WildWords
This game has the same size board and scoring system as Scrabble. The major differences are the inclusion of twelve wild tiles marked with an asterisk that may represent one letter or any series of letters and special board squares that convert a regular letter tile into a wild tile (the tile in question is placed upside down on such a square). The nature of these changes shifts the emphasis of the game from playing short words to playing words of any length. For example, QUA*IST, could be the word QUARTERFINALIST.
[edit] WordSteal
This game is a cross between Othello and Scrabble played on a 13 x13 board. Each player has different coloured tiles. The rack is common and always contains 7 tiles. All tiles have the same value, one point. Points are scored for how many tiles are currently your own colour. The special squares are pink and orange. A word with a tile on a pink square clears the board. When this happens a bonus point is received for each tile you placed on an orange square on that board.
