Play Scrabble, Online Scrabble, Free Scrabble Download
Created | Updated Feb 19, 2010
I've recently gotten hooked on Scrabble, but don't get many chances to play the board game. So instead I find myself wasting endless hours playing Scrabble online. Here's a short list of my favorite sites for where you can play Scrabble online.
Scrabble Cubes at WorldWinner
A highly addictive 3-D version Scrabble that reminds me a little of Boggle and Tetris. You find words by clicking letters on the faces of cubes. The letters have to be connected by either a corner or an edge. After using a cube three times it disintegrates, allowing the any cubes above it to fall down into the empty space, which reveals new letters previously hidden. You can also nuke a cube just by right-clicking it if you get stuck.
You get additional points for longer words, and there are bonus cubes at the corners and middle like the bonus squares in traditional Scrabble. The three-dimensional aspect of the game gets especially interesting when you try and link up multiple bonus cubes. Sometimes I find words that snake around the cube, connecting letters at odd angles and directions.
You can play Scrabble Cubes for free or play for money. To win money, you buy into competitions for as little as $1.00, and play for cash prizes ranging from $3.50 all the way up to $10,000.
WorldWinner has a great special running through Feb. 2010 --> Deposit $5 and Get an EXTRA $20 to compete with
Judging by their lists of recent winners, this seems like a great way to play scrabble for money. For WorldWinner claims it awards $250,000 in prizes everyday.
The site offers some limited but useful social features, allowing you to see how well other players have performed in various games, challenge another player to a game, and send messages back and forth. You can search for players based on their favorite game, and I've used this to contact high-scoring Scrabble Cubes players to ask for tips. Here are a few secrets I've learned:
- Try to combine the triple-letter or double-letter cubes with triple-word or double-word cubes. This is fairly easy since all the letters are arranged in a cube and in close proximity. Again, you can go in any direction as long as the letters are connected along an edge.
- Try to form longer words. The minimum word length is 3 letters, but only form those as a last resort. You get bonus points for words over 3 letters, and you get more bonus points the longer the word. So you get 5 bonus points for a 4-letter word and 10 bonus points for a 5-letter word, but then it jumps up to 25 bonus points for a 6-letter word and 50 bonus points for a 7-letter word.
- This is a universal tip no matter what form of Scrabble you're playing: look for word prefixes and suffixes. I try to never submit a word until I've looked for prefixes like "un" or "re" and suffixes like "ing," "es," "er," "ed" and so on.
- An easy way to pick out longer words is to start with two- and three-letter combinations of consonants, such as "st," "str," "sh," "cr,", "th", and so on.
- Keep in mind you can combine all these tips. For example, you can form a word that uses a dark-blue triple-letter cube (from the far-left or far-right bottom corner), a pink double-word cube (from the near-bottom or far-top corner), and the triple-word cube (from the center of the box). Tack on prefixes or suffixes so the word extends to 6 or 7 letters and get an additional 25 or 50 point bonus.
- Prefixes and suffixes allow you to use essentially the same word twice. For example, once in singular form and again in plural form. In a recent game I scored 88 points for "weapon" and then got 116 points for "weapons."
- Work on speeding up your pace. The game only lasts four minutes, so if the next great word doesn't jump out at you within 10 or 15 seconds, just grab one or two shorter words, which will open up the board to reveal new possibilities.
- Grab the high-scoring letters first: "K" is worth 5 points, "J" and "X" are worth 8 points, "Q" and "Z" are worth 10 points. Use these if you can before the other lower-scoring letters.
- As great as long words are, don't rule out high-scoring short words, especially in cases when you can use the same "X" or "Z" multiple times. Once I was able to get 64 points for "zoo," 105 points for "zig," and 99 points for "zag," all using the same "Z."
Scrabulous.com
The folks behind Scrabulous have created an amazing Java version of the game with a beautifully rendered, highly intuitive interface and tons of options. You can choose between Sowpods and TWL dictionaries, play timed or untimed, play with two to four players in real time, or even alone with the solitaire mode. But most impressive are the community features and the frequent upgrades and improvements the designers come up with. I really like how you can eavesdrop on games that others are playing, which is a great way to learn new words and strategies. Truly a top-notch operation that can't be missed!
Scrabulous extended its social-networking features in 2007 with a highly addictive and viral Facebook application. It's hands-down the best way to play Scrabble on Facebook, and it's now become one of the most popular apps overall on Facebook, with over 600,000 daily active users. It has even spawned offshoot applications, such as Descrablifyer, which claims to find all possible word combinations within a given set of letter tiles.
In January 2008, just three months after law professor John Palfrey raised the issue, both Scrabulous.com and its Facebook counterpart were threatened to be shut down by Hasbro and Mattel, citing trademark infringement. Some reports speculate the companies might be developing their own versions of online Scrabble, while others predict further cease-and-desist actions against online versions of other classic games. The consensus seems to be that the license holders missed the boat by not developing their own versions of online Scrabble sooner, and that bullying Scrabulous will only damage their reputations. Ultimately it seems owners Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla will be forced to sell their online version of scrabble, perhaps to Electronic Arts, who owns the online rights to Hasbro board games.
Hasbro's attempt to shut down Scrabulous is not without precedent. In March, 2005 the company sent a cease-and-desist letter to e-Scrabble.com, a free online Scrabble game created by Jared Klett, who within a month had shut down e-Scrabble and transferred the domain name to Hasbro. Klett had built the site to over 100,000 active players in a 2.5 year period, completely as a labor of love. He went on to co-found blip.tv, the video-sharing site.
Meanwhile thousands of fans have answered the call to save Scrabulous by circulating petitions, forming support groups, and even spreading the word about the joys of playing scrabble online through humorous music videos.
Scrabble Blast at Games.com
This game is definitely a blast, and addictive as well! It's very similar to Scrabble Cubes in that you can connect letters in almost any direction and letter tiles are removed after being used, which causes the letters above to drop into place. This Scrabble game, which you can play online or download, has the extra challenge of bomb tiles, which you must "defuse" before they reach the bottom row. The only way to eliminate a bomb is to use it in a word that contains the same number of letters as the number on the bomb tile. Scrabble Blast is one of three Scrabble game variations at Games.com, which offers a free play online.
ThePixiePit.com
A leisurely, play-by-email version of scrabble. You can play multiple simultaneous games and you don't have to be online to keep them going. This game is great for beginners because you're allowed to use dictionaries or other tools, and you can take up to seven days to contemplate your next move before it expires! Also the web site makes it easy to browse and spy on hundreds of games being played. The owners charge an annual subscription of $12 to cover their hosting and development costs.
more to come...
