Scrabble is one of the most popular board games, and it has found itself an audience among people across all ages and interests. This board game revolves around the idea of expanding and using your vocabulary to create words and score more points than the other players. The points scored by forming each word is dependent on the letters used (for example, some of the most commonly used letters would fetch you only 1 point, while other uncommon letters would help you get 3 or 4 points), and also on the positioning of the words formed by you on the board of the game.
The board contains many places which would fetch you two or three times more points for the specific letter or the entire word that has been formed. It is not just a game to showcase your knowledge of the English language, but it is also an exciting game of strategies which guarantees a lot of fun even if your knowledge is limited when it comes to vocabulary.
As already mentioned, strategizing is extremely important when it comes to playing or winning a round of Scrabble. Some quick tips and tricks which will help you out a lot in securing higher chances of winning a game of Scrabble are listed below.
1. Shorter words go a long way
Quite opposed to what you might feel at the first go, shorter words are actually the key to scoring higher points, and not the words which appear to be a lot more long and fancy at first sight. This is because there is only a limited number of each letter in the game set, and once you exhaust all of one letter in your quest to create one six-letter word, you might unknowingly be giving up on the chance of using them separately in two or three different occasions, which might actually fetch you a higher score when added together.
Another thing is that many a time your word stack might turn out to be quite unfortunate and would not permit you to form a lot of high scoring words. The ideal thing to do in such a scenario is to form a two or three letter word instead of simply passing your turn thinking that you might get a better opportunity next time. Smaller scores add up to a bigger one, and is of course way better than not scoring anything at all.
2. Know your prefixes and suffixes well
Prefixes and suffixes are common letters or phrases which you can add in front of or at the end of many words to transform them into new words. Some of their examples would include ‘ing’, ‘ed’, ‘un’, ‘im’, and so on. If you know well which prefix or suffix matches with which words (or set of words), then you can easily soar your score without forming many newer words on your part at all. This is one of the most swift and easy trick to achieve a high score during a game of Scrabble.
3. Watch out for the ‘hook’ letters
Hook letters are individual letters which can be used in front of a word that already exists in order to change its meaning completely. One such example would be to change ‘lush’ into ‘blush’ just by adding the letter ‘b’ in front of it. This way, what you are basically doing is earning all of the points from a word that has been formed by one of your opponents (or perhaps yourself earlier during the game) and a bit more through the utilisation of the hook letter. This move also ensures that you are losing out on only one letter in that specific turn so that your stack does not go down, which would happen if you were creating the entire word all on your own.
4. Use a scrabble word finder
One of the best tricks to absolutely ace a game of Scrabble is to use a very convenient tool known as the scrabble word finder. Such tools are often found on different websites. What such a word finder basically does in take all the letters which are available to you as an input and then use an inbuilt function to generate all possible words that could be made through different combinations which use up all or some of those letters.
This way, you can also build up a good vocabulary as well as increase your chances of framing higher scoring words. Another great advantage of this method is that you can see all the options you have in terms of the words you can make at once, and then you can select the word wisely, so that you do not use up too many letters, or more than what is required to secure a high score.
5. Read often to keep up with your vocabulary
This is perhaps the most commonsensical tip, but this also goes without saying that you must read and practice on a regular basis in order to not just learn newer words but to also stay updated about the range of vocabulary that you already possess.
This is the best way to increase the likelihoods of you winning any games of Scrabble that you might be participating in, as this way you will always have one or the other word on your mind, no matter how good or bad your stack of alphabets are in any particular round of the game. What also often happens with us that in spite of knowing s word, we are not able to recall it at the moment when we need it the most. Regular sessions of reading will help us retain these bits of information better, so that we are never again at a shortage of options when it come to Scrabble.
All of the above tips and tricks are amazing ways to make sure that your Scrabble skills and enhanced to a great extent, and if you dedicatedly use all of them, then you will be an expert in the game in no time.