Yahoo Scrabble has more downloads of the online edition of the game based on Classic SCRABBLE than any other website. Yahoo Scrabble is like many online Scrabble game variations, with several game options and the features to enhance your Scrabble gaming experience.

Scrabble Maven

Maven is a Scrabble playing AI with different levels of difficulty. You can play Scrabble in a mode where each win forces you to another level of difficulty. These level of difficulty gets a little out of hand once you progress through a bunch of levels, in my opinion, but I still enjoy a good Scrabble challenge.

Free Trial Offer

Yahoo Scrabble offers a downloadable free trial offer that lets you play for a certain amount of time. At present, this time limit is 50 minutes, so you should be able to play around one game of Scrabble to test out the system.

The Download

The download worked fairly quickly on my computer, though it had me worried for a minute or two. When I first downloaded Yahoo Scrabble, the Scrabble "box" appeared so large as to not fit on my screen. If this happens to you, don't worry. In my case, at least, the Scrabble board fit onto my screen perfectly fine once I made it to the game options.

The Scrabble Dictionary

The Scrabble dictionary that Yahoo! uses is not the latest edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. Certain of the two-word options are not allowed by the computer. This can be a little frustrating when playing, and I'm not sure yet which Scrabble dictionary that Yahoo! uses. When I learn, I will post it on this site.

I remember one player on the message boards complaining that he couldn't use a particular word, but the Scrabble Maven was able to use it several words later. You won't be able to challenge words that the computer uses, so this would be a big drawback to Yahoo Scrabble, if this is the case.

Scrabble Hint System

Beginners can use the hint system software to get ideas for usable words. This is great for children, though us old-timers and purists turn our noses up at it. If you don't like the idea of a Scrabble hint, just ignore it. I personally think it's good to give newcomers and youngsters encouragement when learning our great game.

Scrabble Vocabulary Builder

Along the same lines, the Scrabble software includes an option to look at the definition of any word used by you or the computer. Once again, this is a great tool to help build the vocabularies of children. So I give extra points for the fact that Yahoo Scrabble is a possible educational tool for kids.

Yahoo Scrabble Price Tag

The price to buy the full version of the Yahoo! Scrabble is $19.99. That is probably more than a basic brick-and-mortar Scrabble set, but you have to remember that it takes a little more time to design online Scrabble software than it does to design the rules of Scrabble.