The Scrabble board game is one of those classic word/trivia board games which has been around a good number of years and is thus very well known throughout most households. The aim of the game is to create as many words with as many of your letters as possible throughout the game, with the aim of getting the highest score possible. Obtaining a high score is where the strategy comes in.
What you will find with many players is that they purely aim to get rid of their tiles, so although they finish the game with no tiles remaining their score may actually be relatively low and so they will probably still end up loosing the game anyway. As with all board games practice will make perfect if you stick at it long enough but ultimately there are also a few simple strategies you can remember which will help you a long your way.
Strategy 1: Always Use The Q!
The letter Q is probably one of the most disliked letters in the entire Scrabble board game, especially if you don’t have anything suitable to sit along side it. What most people look for when they have this letter is for a letter U so they can come up with a word, the most common being queer, queen or Que, however there are many more simple words which people don’t know about that don’t require the letter U. Just a few of these include Qaid(s), Qintar(s), Qoph(s).
Strategy 2: Make Sure You Learn The Hard Letter Words, E.g. X, J, Q & Z
These letters are notoriously the hardest to get words for, it maybe that the person does have the right letters but they may just struggle to think of a particular word to make. Ensuring that you know words which contain and start with these letters will ultimately give you an overall higher score.
Strategy 3: Don’t Throw Away Your Letter S’s
One of the simpler strategies you might see people use is where the tag an S onto an existing word on the board and use the score from that word to get a few points higher. This can be a great tactic especially where you might be able to earn yourself a double or triple word score, but it’s only in those circumstances where the letter should be used in that way. Otherwise you’re just giving your opponents another space for them to create a word from, without you really gaining very many points from it.
So what you really need to do is keep the letter S until you are fully sure that you are able to maximise the value it will provide.
Strategy 4: Looking For A Prefix Or Suffix
Another great way for you to earn extra points is to look for prefixes or suffixes, these work in a similar way to adding letter onto the end of words but they are more effective because you are adding more than just one letter onto the end or beginning of a word. Just one example would be the word tail, this could be extending by adding the letters “Re” onto the beginning to make the word “Retail”.
Strategy 5: Make Sure You Learn Those Two Letter Words
Learning the shorter words is a great way to maximise the potential value of your words. Once the game gets towards the final stages you will find that the game board starts to get crowded, it also gets harder and harder for people to create words. But this is the time in the game when you can start to get rid of those unwanted letters by creating words like Up, ox, so etc, etc.
Strategy 6: Keep The Easier Letter For Later
You should always try to create harder words first, use your letter for the easier words once you start to get stuck.
These are just a few ways you can improve your Scrabble game, there are others but what we’ve tried to do here is cover the main ones for you to give you a good starting point. Remember that practise will make perfect most of the time.
