How To Play Scrabble on Your Computer
Playing Electronic Scrabble
Finding out how to play Scrabble on your computer is a little harder than it was even two years ago. Hasbro decided they didn’t like online game websites offering online Scrabble, so Hasbro took legal action to make sure most Internet Scrabble games were taken off the web. So you’re probably having trouble finding official Scrabble games for your computer.
I can direct you to one or two sites that still offer computer Scrabble, but you’re going to have to fight through a bit of a rant as I tell you about them. I apologize, but when I started trying to find computer Scrabble for this post, it angered me again that so many of my favorite online Scrabble sources no longer exist. So bear with me.
Pogo Scrabble
Pogo.com has some kind of partnership with Hasbro, because it’s one of the few spots you can play Scrabble online anymore. Scrabble on Pogo is played just like the real world version of Scrabble and involves players from all over the world. At this moment, Pogo has over 9,700 people worldwide playing online Scrabble at their site.
You can choose to play from the “United States and Canada” or “Other Region”. The distinction involves the official word list used for each game. In the U.S., Canada and Thailand, players use the TWL word list, which coincidentally enough stands for “The World List”. In all other parts of the world, the words used are the “SOWPODS”, which includes the TWL combined with another word list, based on United Kingdom standards. The “Other Region” games therefore have a larger list of words to play from.
If you are playing in Thailand and want to use your local official word list, choose “United States and Canada” as your official region.
Pogo Scrabble Blast
Scrabble Blast can also be played on Pogo. Scrabble Blast involves a grid of letters that looks similar to a Scrabble board, except entirely full of letters. You try to find words in this grid of letters. When you do, you get points for the words you highlight. Like Scrabble, you get points for the number value on the tile, while also getting bonus points for multiplier squares like double word, triple word, double letter and triple letter squares.
Unlike Scrabble, you also get bonus points the longer the word you spell is. Also, there are bomb tiles that steadily move down the board, according to your plays. If one of these bombs reaches the bottom of the board, you lose.
It used to be that Scrabble Blast was available on most Scrabble sites, word game sites and online game websites, but Scrabble Blast has virtually disappeared.
Yahoo Scrabble – Yahoo Word Games
At the moment, every time I try to play Scrabble on Yahoo!, I get a message saying I can’t access that page. Since there are four Scrabble links (Scrabble, Scrabble Maven, Scrabble Plus and Scrabble Journey) that are 404 pages and all the other word games seem to work fine, I’m assuming Hasbro has forced Yahoo to take down their Scrabble games. Guess it was a business decision.
Since Yahoo hasn’t taken down these links yet, maybe you’ll be able to play Scrabble on Yahoo Games sometimes in the future. Since Yahoo has dozens of other great word games to play online, and since I resent having Hasbro take down most of the decent online Scrabble sites, I’m going to go ahead and post a link to Yahoo Word Games, assuming most of my Scrabble readers like other wordgames, too.
Call it rebellion against Hasbro and its corporate ways. I know they don’t want people making money off of their game, but I wish Hasbro would see that limiting the ability of people to play online Scrabble limits their Scrabble-buying public, since word games encourage good spelling and word skills and most online activity does not. That’s probably just a lame justification on my part because I selfishly want as much Scrabble being played online as possible, but if you can’t play Scrabble online at Yahoo, but you enjoy Yahoo Games, you might as well be enjoying some kind of word game action on there.
Scrabble CD-ROMs and Interactive Scrabble
You can still purchase CD-Rom versions of Scrabble marketed by Hasbro. These games have a computer disc which includes various versions of Scrabble on them. This is yet another way to play Scrabble on your computer that is overlooked in the day of Internet game sites.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 3:03 pmand is filed under Scrabble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.