Scrabble is a great game that doubles as a learning tool.
a fan of educational toys, buying classic toys, a person who enjoys quality, competitive, Board Game Lover
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JUL
23
2008
The game itself comes with a game board, 100 tiles with letters and numerical values on them, a letter bag, and four racks to place those letters on. One important thing to have on hand, and maybe keep with the game, is a dictionary that the people playing can agree upon. This comes into play if two people disagree on the spelling of any particular word. To start out the game, all of the tiles are shuffled up, and each player (2, 3, or 4) takes a turn drawing a tile. The person that has the letter closest to 'A' gets to play first. If one person happens to draw one of the blank tiles, they automatically go first. The blank tiles serve as sort of wild cards in the game, and can be used to represent any letter in the alphabet.
The board is set up with squares (15x15), and on specific squares, there are bonuses that you can attain by placing a letter on one of them. These include double and triple letter scores, or double and triple word scores. So, a lot of the strategy comes into play when you decide what letter to play on a specific square. As I stated earlier, each letter has a specific value assigned to it. The more rare that a letter is, the more that it is worth if you can play it in a word. In addition, there are fewer of those lettered tiles in thx box. So, for a letter like A or I, there are 9 in the box, while there is only one X in the set. Playing an A or an I by itself gives you one point, but playing that X will get you 8 points. To find out what you have scored for a specific word, you add up all of the numbers on the tiles, factor the bonus squares into play, and total up your word score.
Game play starts (after the tiles have been shuffled), by each player drawing 7 tiles at random, and placing them in the wooden racks in front of them. The first person to play must form a word of at least two letters, with at least one of those letters being in the center square of the board. Once they are done with their turn, they then draw replacement tiles from the pile, until they are back to 7 total in their rack. The next player then plays off of the first word, and creates a new word spawning off of it. However the letters are placed, they must spell out words that are contained in the dictionary being used for play. If you are able to use all 7 tiles in one turn, on one word, you receive a 50 point bonus. Turns continue until all of the letters have been drawn and one player uses their last letter, or when all possible plays have been made. At this point, those tiles unplayed are subtracted from their owners total. This leaves us with one winner: whoever has the most total points.
The game has a lot of strategy to it, and it sometimes favors those people with a larger vocabulary. However, it is a game that anyone can jump right into to, and it can appeal to people of all ages. It is the type of game that can be played as a family, and can turn into a really great learning tool. All over the United States, there are Scrabble clubs that form to hold competitions of this game, but it doesn't ever have to get that competitive. In fact, you could play this game without keeping score, and still come away from it having fun. This game has served hours of entertainment purposes for me, and I have found that everytime I played it, I learned a little more. It helped me to think faster, it helped me to resolve word combinations in my head, and it helped my vocabulary a lot. This is a game that I have found very fun, and I can honestly recommend it to everyone.
Scrabble Classic Edition is recommended by SpokaneMan
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