How To Play Anagram Scrabble
Anagram Scrabble – Scrabble Games
Anagram Scrabble is a Scrabble variant which can be played by adding one rule to the classic game, so if you want to enhance the next Scrabble night around the dinner table, ask your playing group whether they would be interested in a house rule. You only have to introduce one new rules change, which probably makes it easier for those players who don’t like curveballs or change of any kind, so here’s how to play anagram Scrabble.
Set up Classic Scrabble
Set up the traditional game of Scrabble that you’re used to. Every rule that would normally apply to Scrabble, from triple letter and word scores to official word lists and from the number of letters held on your rack to the double letter and word scores will be the same. The standard rules of Scrabble apply in every way. Figure scores for the word you set down as you would in any normal game of Scrabble.
Bonus Points for Anagrams
The one scoring rule change for when you play Anagram Scrabble is scoring when you play a word with an anagram. For instance, if you play the word “three”, you can announce that three has an anagram: “ether”. The letters are exactly the same in each word, with none left out. The letters are simply rearranged.
In this example, you would not only get your standard points for “three”, but you would get bonus points for “ether”. You get only the face value points of ether that show up on the letter tiles. You won’t get any double letter, double word, triple letter or triple word scores that would normally apply. You won’t get an extra 50 point bonus if your anagram word clears your rack. So you won’t get.
Also, you won’t get bonus points for a second anagram. For instance, you could also name “there” as an anagram of “three”, so there would be two possible anagrams for the word you put down. Since you already got bonus points for the anagram, though, you wouldn’t get an extra set of bonus points. You get a one time bonus and that’s it. (Though I would love to play a game of Anagram Scrabble sometime where you get extra bonus points for every anagram that word has. I think that would be wicked challenging and fun.)
Remember, in this example, if you should get bonus points for the word you laid down (three), you will get those normally for the actual word you put on the board.
Definition of Anagram
You might want to be certain of the meaning of “anagram”, before explaining it to your Scrabble club. According to Merriam-Webster, an anagram is “a word or phrase made by transposing the letters of another word or phrase”. According to the Free Online Dictionary, an anagram is a “word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase”. The example they give is “satin to stain”.
I’m assuming you already knew all this, if you enjoy wordgames, since Anagrams is one of the oldest word games there is.
Anagrams Online
If you are playing Anagrams or Anagram Scrabble online and you get stumped, you might want to go to an anagrammer website to get a jump start, or simply for the fun of seeing the possibilities and learning new words. One good option is the anagram solver on anagrammer.com (http://www.anagrammer.com/).
Playing Anagram Scrabble
Anagram Scrabble is a good way to increase scoring and volatility of scores in Scrabble. The changes in the final scores will be greater, but Scrabble anagrams won’t radically alter the course of your game. Knowing how to play anagram scrabble lets you add a little extra edge to your Scrabble games for the night, and rewards the person who can see all the possibilities of a word combination.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 6:05 pmand is filed under Scrabble, Words. 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.