You're currently playing a heated game of Scrabble or Words with Friends. The game is close, too close for comfort. But you're not sweating because you're confident. You play a huge word that puts you in the lead, but then when your letter tiles are drawn...
It's sad to say, but I will no longer be writing up anymore Scrabble Challenges. Frankly, I just don't have the time to make them now. And though they are incredibly fun and "challenging" to conjure up, I'm not sure that people are finding them as useful as I had hoped. But really, it all comes down to time. So, unless I have a future craving for puzzle-making, last week's Scrabble Challenge #20 was the last one.
Hey guys i've found a great scrabble word checker that contains six different dictionaries including TWL, YAWL, SOWPODS, ENABLE, etc to download the app vist the developers android market page at;
Bluffing is one of the key components of poker. You may have a horrible hand, but if you can play it cool and raise the bet, you might just be able to convince your opponents otherwise and induce a few folds. But if you can't handle a little subterfuge, then you shouldn't be playing the game. Even the slightest tell could give you away. You have to maintain a poker face, no matter what.
Our first game, Rex verbi, was recently published. It's a word game similar to Scrabble with dictionaries for ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, DANISH, NORWEGIAN and DUTCH.
Long story, but I'll keep it short - does anybody have any ideas on calculating the points distribution for scrabble letters using the Albanian alphabet (which has 36 letters)? Secondary question is how many tiles should be used given that the alphabet contains 36, rather than 26? I've worked out the frequency distribution of the letters.
As touched upon in the past, knowing all of the possible words you can play is key to being a better Scrabble player. If you don't have the vocabulary, then you can't compete against the best of the best, and you'll never even get the chance to spar against professionals such as Nigel Richards, Joe Edley, Andrew Fisher, and Wayne Kelly.
The big day may be over, but the weekend is still full of Thanksgiving spirit. And so is this week's puzzle. But let's keep it short this time, because we should all be taking this time to play a real game of Scrabble with friends and family. I was thinking of making a puzzle about edible birds in general, but practically every bird is edible, meaning there's a lot of avian-related words. Since the turkey is such a big part of Thanksgiving, let's just stick to that...
Being able to spell a seven-letter word on the board is one of the most enjoyable things about playing Scrabble. It's even better when those seven letters are all from your rack, giving you a bingo—those 50 bonus points in addition to your regular score.
There are tons of mobile apps out there for the gaming logophile, but there's a new word building game taking over iPhones and iPads, and it not only wants you to have fun, it wants you to fight back in the "war against words". It's the Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. But you can just call it W.E.L.D.E.R.
I can't say it's absolutely true, but when it comes to mobile word gaming, there's Scrabble people and then there's Words with Friends people. It feels segregational. Rarely does one play both. At least, that's what I see when it comes to my family and friends.
Below are all of my past Scrabble Challenges, which you can all still try out. I'm no longer making them, due to lack of interest, but who knows... maybe one day I'll start up again. If you like them, let me know!
The concept of Scrabble and Words with Friends is the same—play words, score points, win. But the games require different strategy in terms of letter placement, premium squares, tile point values and word choices. Here's the main differences between the two games.
Nearly every game takes strategy to win, but when it comes to games like Scrabble and Words with Friends, you've also got to have a lexically inclined mind full of wonderful and weird words. Most start out by learning all of the two-letter words in the Scrabble dictionary, then work their way up to three-letter words. But where do you go from there?
Halloween is just a few days away, and since I've been churning out the creepy Bingo of the Days for everyone the past few weeks, it seems fitting to do a puzzle based on them.
Pumpkins, murderers, vampires, zombies, ghosts, witches, death… these are all the subjects of last week's Scrabble Bingo of the Days, which focused on words associated with Halloween and horror movies. Did you know there was actually a name for someone who suffocated another person? Did you know that Frankenstein, vampires, and ghosts can all be considered one thing? Did you know that there was actually a word for rotten dead flesh?
Last week's challenge brought up a good question (thanks Lisa) regarding the functionality of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition, both online and in print form. The word TACTICAL was the answer to the first puzzle in that challenge, but when you search for the word directly in the print version, it can't be found. Likewise, when you search the online dictionary on Hasbro's site, you won't find it either. Go ahead, try it. You won't find it looking for TACTICAL specifically.
Electronic Arts (EA) and Hasbro have always been a little slow at adapting Scrabble for the cyber culture. They failed to beat Scrabulous to the Facebook market by a whole year, but managed to save face by targeting the mobile market, specifically iPhone and iPod touch, making Scrabble one of the very first mobile apps in the iTunes App Store.
Halloween will be here in just over a week, which means next week these Scrabble Bingo of the Days will become more horrific. This week, there's just a few relevant Halloween seven-letter words for your Scrabble vocabulary, referencing witchcraft and one of the eeriest horror movies of all time, The Thing (not this year's version).
In these weekly Scrabble Challenges, so far we've covered two-letter words, double bingos, high scoring moves, triple-triples, last moves, parallel plays, phoneys and opening moves. For this week's puzzle, we're revisiting the strategy for opening moves.
Mugshots aren't just for criminals anymore. In the world of competitive Scrabble, no one's safe from the lens of photojournalist Roger Cullman. For the last couple years, Cullman has been hitting up the Scrabble circuit with hopes of immortalizing some of the world's best Scrabble players in headshot pictures of them holding racks with their surnames spelled out in Scrabble tiles.
Cheating. It happens everywhere. From scientists faking human ears on mice, to Hollywood thirty-somethings cheating on their quadragenarian wives, to chess players accusing supercomputers of fraud. There's no game or profession out there that doesn't have a cheater or two, but the bigger nuisance is probably those people who accuse others of cheating.
Last weekend the 2011 World Scrabble Championship was held at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw, Poland. There were 106 players competing from 44 countries for the $20,000 first place prize and title of World Scrabble Champion.
There's only a few week left until costumes and candy take over the streets, which means they'll be more and more seven-letter words in the Scrabble Bingo of the Days that relate to the Fall season, horror movies, and of course… Halloween. Below you'll find bingo words relevant such films as Halloween, Children of the Corn and The Wicker Man.
