DO – two points!!!. Review on Scrabble

Scrabble, an intelligent game that requires much patience, or in my case, not!

The idea of Scrabble, as with all games, is to win. At the beginning of the game each player takes seven tiles from the bag of letters. You then try and make the longest word you can out of you seven letters. The person with the longest word goes first and places their word in the middle of the board. Play then continues clockwise and the next person must place a word on the board which joins an existing word. When you have used some of your letters you must take some more from the bag so that you still have seven tiles. This continues until there are no more tiles in the bag, the person with the highest score wins.

Points are scored from the words that you place on the board. Each letter has a points value written on it. The easy letters like A, S, E are only worth one point but the more difficult letters like Q, Z, X are worth more. You can earn extra points by putting your words on special squares on the board. If you word passes through a ‘Triple Word Score’ square you get three times as much as you normally would!

Because this is a thinking game it can last a long time. I would recommend that you have the television on at the same time so that while you are waiting ages for one person to put their three letter word down you have something to do. If there’s only two of you it can get very lonely while the other person is thinking and you have nothing else to do.

The game is going to be better if you all have around the same intelligence level so it isn’t really a family game. You can’t really play with your mum, dad and six year old little sister because your little sister will be very far behind and will then sulk for the entire week because you didn’t let her win. It’s better to play with people all your own age or you could have handicaps!!!

After playing Scrabble for half an hour you will probably start getting bored and then won’t bother to play as well. Hence ending up with to or three word letters all over the board which makes it harder to put words down!!

If you are going to buy a Scrabble board I would recommend getting the deluxe version which has little ridges around each tile so that once you put your letters down the won’t move anywhere. There’s nothing worse than getting halfway through a game and being 100 points up when you cat decides to come and lie in the middle of the board. The letters will end up strewn everywhere and you won’t know where you were and will have to start the entire game again. (For those non Cornish people strewn = thrown around everywhere). The deluxe version also has a little swively bit on the bottom so that you can turn the board to face you when it’s your turn, then you won’t have to look at the board upside down!!

If you have any letters left at the end you are supposed to have points taken off. My recommendation is that you learn by heart all of the two letter words (which are all provided on a card in the Scrabble box). You’ll be able to get rid of most of your letters at the end of the game then!

Scrabble is the type of game you would play when you are really bored and have nothing else better to do. It’s more of an educational game than a fun one so good to give your children to play, don’t expect them to like it though!!