Scrabble

(Courtesy from Boardgamegeek)

Scrabble is another old game which has its history dated back to 1948. It is purely a game of words and in a way, simpler to play than chess. All it needs to win is a strong vocabulary and a fast creative mind. Oh yeah, and luck as well.

Players have seven tiles on their rack and play a word from it on the board. The tiles have to be placed next to each other in a straight vertical or horizontal line. After his/her turn, he/she has to replenish his tile rack with new tiles from the tile bag. Otherwise, the player can also pass or exchange some or all of its tiles. Players cannot exchange tiles when total number of tiles in the bag is less than seven. Marks are then counted accordingly and the player with the most points at the end of the game wins.

At tournament level, clocks will be used to limit each player's time to think (hence the term 'fast creative mind'). Normal time limit will be 25 minutes per player to complete all his/her turns. Any overtime will be penalised at 10 points per minute with a maximum of 50 points.

When a bingo is formed (ie all tiles on the tile rack are played to form valid words within the same turn), the player will receive a boost of 50 points in addition to the play.

Most of the time, tournament scrabble will witness players playing words which are not normally used in everyday life. Words such as "zo", "dzo", "dzho", "zati" and "cwm" raise doubts among conventional players.

All in all, scrabble is fun but to improve in scrabble, players may want to venture into other type of word games to improve wordpower such as Upword, Boggle etc.