Scrabble

Players and equipment

Two to four players, each for themselves. The board is fifteen squares by fifteen with premium squares printed on it, and the bag holds a hundred tiles: ninety-eight letters, each with a value printed in the corner, and two blanks. A rack each, and a dictionary the table agrees on before the first move. This is a brief in our own words; the rulebook in the box is the authority.

The letters are not all worth the same, and the rare ones are worth the most.

One point

1

A, E, I, O, U, L, N, S, T, R

Two points

2

D, G

Three points

3

B, C, M, P

Four points

4

F, H, V, W, Y

Five points

5

K

Eight points

8

J, X

Ten points

10

Q, Z

Blank

0

Stands for any letter

The deal

Everybody draws one tile and the nearest the front of the alphabet goes first, a blank beating any letter. Put them back, shuffle the bag, and each player draws seven. The opening word covers the centre square and may run across or down, and play then passes to the left.

Play

On your turn you do exactly one of three things: lay a word, swap any number of your tiles for fresh ones, or pass. Then draw back up to seven while the bag still holds tiles. A swap is your whole turn, scores nothing, and is only allowed while the bag holds at least seven tiles.

Every word must join what is already on the board, through a letter already down or beside one, and must read left to right or top to bottom, all the tiles you lay in one straight line. Every new run of two or more letters your turn creates has to be a word in its own right, so a word laid alongside another has to make a word at every point where they touch.

A challenge is settled by the dictionary before the next player moves, and the usual ruling is that a word not in it comes back off the board and the turn is lost. Nobody may look in the dictionary before playing a word, only to check one that has been played.

A blank stands for any letter. Say which as you lay it and it stays that letter for the rest of the game, scoring nothing itself, though a premium square under it still counts for the word.

Scoring

Add your turn up and enter it in your own column. Every letter counts its printed value, and a premium square only counts on the turn a tile first lands on it. Letter squares are applied first, then word squares.

Double letter

That tile counts twice

Light blue square

Triple letter

That tile counts three times

Dark blue square

Double word

The whole word doubled

Pink square, the centre included

Triple word

The whole word tripled

Red square

All seven tiles in one turn

50 on top

What everybody is playing for

A word covering two premium word squares is doubled or tripled by each in turn, so a word reaching from one red square to another is worth nine times its letters. A turn that makes more than one word scores every one of them, and a letter shared between two words counts in both. The fifty for all seven tiles is added last, after every multiplication, and is never itself doubled.

A worked turn

TONE lies across the middle of the board. Ben holds Z, B, R, A and three tiles he cannot use. He lays ZEBRA down the board through the E of TONE: the Z sits on a light blue square above the E, and the A lands on a pink square at the bottom, right beside a T already on the board, so it also makes the word AT.

Z

10, doubled to 20

On a double letter square

E

1

Already on the board, part of TONE

B

3

Plain square

R

1

Plain square

A

1

On a double word square

ZEBRA

52

26 for the letters, doubled by the pink square

AT

4

The A and the T beside it, doubled by the same square

The turn

56

Four tiles laid, no bonus

The E scores its plain one because the square under it was used up when TONE was played. The pink square doubles both words the A belongs to, which is why a premium square at the corner of two words is worth hunting for. Ben enters 56 and draws four tiles.

A worked ending

The bag is empty. Cara lays her last two tiles and the game ends at once. Ben still holds Q and I, and Alice holds a V.

Cara

15 on

Went out, and gains what the others hold

Ben

11 off

Holding Q and I

Alice

4 off

Holding V

Had the game ended on passes instead, everybody would have lost the value of their own tiles and nobody would have gained.

Ending

The game ends when the bag is empty and one player lays their last tile, or when every player passes twice over. Each player still holding tiles loses their value, and the player who went out gains the total of everybody else's.

The score boxes in SquareScores take whole numbers and nothing below nothing, so make that last adjustment on entries already in the table rather than adding a round for it. Every cell stays editable: the player who went out puts the bonus on their final turn, and everybody else takes their leftovers off theirs, working back a row if one turn will not carry it. Highest total wins.

Keep a balanced rack

The tiles you keep matter as much as the ones you play. Aim to end each turn holding vowels and consonants that go together, and get rid of duplicates: two Us or three Is will sit on your rack for turns. Letters that make word endings, such as E, R, S, T and the ING group, are the ones to hold back, because they turn the next draw into a seven-tile play.

Learn the two-letter words

The two-letter words are what let you lay one word alongside another, scoring in both directions at once. There are more than a hundred in the standard lists: AA, AE, AI, JO, KA, OD, OE, OI, QI, XI, XU, ZA and the rest.

Use the premium squares

A letter square wants a heavy letter and a word square wants a long one. Put the Z, Q, X or J on a double or triple letter square, and better still on one that counts in two words at once: an X on a triple letter square making AX one way and XI the other is 48 for a single tile. Save a seven-tile word for a red square if you can, because with the fifty on top it is usually worth more than a hundred.

The S and the blank

The four Ss and the two blanks are the most valuable tiles in the bag, and neither is worth much on its own. An S hooks onto the end of a word already on the board, making a new word there while your own word runs off it in the other direction, so it is two scores for one tile. A blank is worth even more: it is the missing letter in your seven-tile play, and that is the only thing worth using it for unless the game is nearly over.

Defence

Every play opens the board for the next player as well as for you. Do not leave a vowel beside a triple letter square, or an easy road to a red square, unless what you score is worth the gift. Late in the game, count what is left in the bag and on the other racks: if the Q is still out and you hold a U, you can make sure nobody else has a place to put it.

Words With Friends

The phone game is Scrabble with the numbers changed. The bag holds 104 tiles, the letter values differ, so a B is four rather than three and a J ten rather than eight, and the premium squares are laid out in a different pattern. All seven tiles in one turn earn 35 rather than 50. There are no challenges: the app refuses a word it does not know and you simply try another.

Super Scrabble

A bigger board, twenty-one squares by twenty-one, and two hundred tiles, twice the standard set. Beyond the double and triple squares it has quadruple letter and quadruple word squares towards the edges, so a single turn can score several hundred.

Duplicate

Everybody plays the same game at once. Each player has the same rack and the same board, writes down the best play they can find within a time limit, and scores their own play; the highest-scoring play is then put on the board and everyone moves on to the next rack. Luck of the draw is taken out entirely, which is why it is the tournament game in French-speaking countries.

Challenges

The rulebook says a word that fails a challenge comes off and the turn is lost, and says nothing about a challenge that fails. Tables fill the gap three ways: a free challenge, where a wrong challenge costs nothing; a five-point penalty for a wrong challenge, which is the British tournament rule; and the double challenge of North American tournaments, where a challenger who is wrong loses their own next turn. Agree which you play before the first word goes down.

A fixed number of turns

Instead of playing the bag out, each player takes an agreed number of turns, ten or twelve, and the highest total wins. It fits a game into a set time and takes the drawn-out end out of it. The tiles left on the racks are usually ignored, though a table can agree to deduct them as usual.

Can you use proper nouns in Scrabble?

No. The standard rule bars any word that is always spelt with a capital letter, along with abbreviations, prefixes and suffixes on their own, and words that need a hyphen or an apostrophe. A word that is a name but also an ordinary word, such as a china cup or a polish for the table, is allowed because the dictionary lists it in lower case.

What happens when a word is challenged in Scrabble?

The next player must challenge before making their own move; after that the word stands. If the word is not in the dictionary the table agreed on, the tiles come back off the board and the player who laid them scores nothing and loses their turn. If it is, it stays, and what happens to the challenger depends on the house rule: nothing, a five-point penalty, or the loss of their next turn.

Is the blank worth any points?

No, a blank scores nothing wherever it lands. But a premium square under it still works: a blank on a double word square doubles the whole word, and a blank counts as one of the seven tiles for the fifty-point bonus. Once laid it stays the letter it was named for the rest of the game.

How does the 50-point bonus work?

If you lay all seven tiles from your rack in one turn, add fifty to the score for that turn. The word can be longer than seven letters, because it may pass through letters already on the board, and the fifty is added after all the premium squares have been counted, so it is never doubled or tripled.

What do you do if you cannot make a word?

You can swap any or all of your tiles for new ones from the bag, so long as the bag holds at least seven, and that is your whole turn. Or you can pass. If every player passes twice in a row the game ends, and everybody loses the value of the tiles they still hold.

How many tiles are in Scrabble?

A hundred: ninety-eight letters and two blanks. There are twelve Es, nine each of A and I, eight Os, six each of N, R and T, four each of D, L, S and U, three Gs, two each of B, C, F, H, M, P, V, W and Y, and one each of J, K, Q, X and Z.