How To Play Speed Scrabble
Speed Scrabble Rules
There are many ways to learn how to play Speed Scrabble, so if the following rules don’t fit your house rules, that’s perfectly legitimate. The following for of Speed Scrabble is the most widely played version, or at least the most agreed-upon Speed Scrabble rules on the Internet.
Later, I’ll discuss Speed Scrabble variations.
Speed Scrabble Setup
Speed Scrabble uses the standard word tiles used in Scrabble. The game does not use a Scrabble board. This should be set aside, though you will need a flat surface to play Speed Scrabble on.
Your flat surface will need to be pretty large, at least the size of a kitchen table, because the individual players will need their own work spaces. If you have more than 4 players playing Speed Scrabble, consider combining two sets of Scrabble tiles to have the right number of letter tiles for enjoyable play.
When setting up for Speed Scrabble, have a community pile of letter sitting face down on the table. Also, each player gets 7 tiles apiece to start the game, just as in Scrabble. The only difference is these tiles are not looked at by the player until gameplay starts. These remain face down until someone says “Go”.
Speed Scrabble Play
Play begins in Speed Scrabble when the youngest player says go. Everyone immediately overturns their seven letter tiles and tries to build a word or word using those tiles. Like in conventional Scrabble, you’re going to try to build crossword trees, so that every word you build needs to be connected at least at one point with the other words. The rules for word-building are the same as for traditional Scrabble.
The only difference is that everyone builds their own Scrabble crossword. Your words won’t touch anyone else’s crosswords.
Speed Scrabble Turns
When someone has a crossword built with all 7 letters in a legal arrangement, that player calls out “Two More Letters” and everyone draws two more letters from the community letter pile. Players then begin to build words using their 9 letters. You can choose to simply build words off the original crossword or start all over. The only stipulation is that words have to be official Engish words from the dictionary or the official Scrabble word list – whatever rules your Scrabble group is playing with.
Play will continue with each player have 9 letters instead of 7, until someone builds a legal crossword using all nine letters. At that point, the player will call out “Two More Letters” and everyone will build letter trees with their 11 letters, instead of 9.
Play continues in this fashion until all the letters in the community pile are gone. If, at some point, there arent’ enough tiles for all players to draw 2 tiles apiece, the player who built the word tree first on the last round should say “One More Letter”. If there are not enough letters for everyone in the game to grab one more letter, that person says “I’m Out”.
Winning Speed Scrabble
At this point, play is over and people add up their scores. Players get points as one would in Scrabble, according to the point values on the letter tiles. You only get point values for the full words you built. If you have letters that aren’t in the crossword as part of legal words, you are penalized the point values on those tiles.
Also, any words of 7 or more letters gives that player +10 bonus points. This is the only bonus. So if you built a 14 letter word, you don’t get +20 in the standard version of Speed Scrabble. In other word, it’s better to have two 7 point words than one 14 point word.
Speed Scrabble Variations
Many Scrabble groups set a point limit for achieving victory, usually either 500 to 1000 points. So when the first set of crosswords are built and points totaled, the letters all go back in the common pile and you start over. This continues until someone achieves the points needed to win. Longer games like this tend to even out the luck of who gets the best letters in a shorter game.
Other groups use a pool of 7 tiles and then draw from their reserve pool of 8 tiles, instead of using the “Two More Tiles” format. Other speed scrabble games require players to count down the number of tiles they have left to play, to better give people an idea of how much time they have.
Still other Speed Scrabble players assign a point value to players who go out on each hand. So the person who gets to say “Two More Letters” might be given for +10 points for going out earliest.
There are probably a hundred other methods of how to play Speed Scrabble out there that I’ve never heard of. If any of our longtime word game players have any alternate rules for Speed Scrabble or Bananagrams, let us know.
See also:
- How To Play Scrabble
- Scrabble Online
- Scrabble Solver
- Scrabble Dictionary
- Scrabble Cheat
- Scrabble Help
- Toys R Us Coupons
This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 5:53 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.