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It's definitely situational, and I wouldn't call myself "great", but I have traded in tiles before, for a number of reasons -- I'm behind, and I have a hand full of either all vowels or all consonants (usually all consonants) I'm one letter away from a bingo, and I've calculated that I have a good chance of drawing that letter. For me, using or ...

Like you said, the center tile counts as a Double Word Score tile, so whoever plays first gets double the points. That is an official rule. The second and third rules mentioned are house rules, and are not supported in the Scrabble rules. The second rule would possibly prevent you from hitting one of the adjacent Double Letter Score tiles unless your word ...

Yes, most definitely. A good write up on exchange strategy can be found in Joe Edley's book Everything Scrabble, pg. 89 and following. Tournament players do exchange significantly less than they did when Everything Scrabble was first written, since the recent (well, not that recent any more, 2006) addition of QI and ZA to the official Scrabble lexicon have ...

Every dictionary has words that would be considered "ridiculous" in it. You can choose to have an arbitrary subset of ridiculous words, but that doesn't really improve the situation any. Most of these are in every reasonably-sized dictionary anyway (e.g. how do you feel about ZAX?). There are a small enough number of 2-letter words that you can ban them on ...

The board layout - the positioning of the bonus squares is different. Words With Friends: Scrabble: Also, the distribution and points scored for the letters in Words With Friends is slightly different to Scrabble. For example, B and C score 3 points in Scrabble, but 4 points in Words With Friends.

You can check for yourself at the Official Scrabble Dictionary. According to that site: za is a legal word lez is not (Keep reading) Words With Friends uses the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon with a few additions per their website. ENABLE is a public domain word list for use with word programs. Thanks to @thesun's research it is obvious ...

From the official rules: All tiles played in any one turn must be placed in one row only across, or one column only down the board. As you know, it is perfectly fine to score for multiple different words you made on your turn, but only if you made them from tiles played that turn. Since any tiles played on that turn must be in a single row or column, ...

There is a good detail on Scrabble Bingo's on the Wikipedia page here. Bingo is a game where each player is issued a card with numbers. A caller calls out numbers drawn at random and the player will cross of numbers on their card. The first person to have all of their numbers crossed off will shout out Bingo! So there is a parallel between this game where ...

LittleBobbyTales is correct about the tournament rules. Beyond what he has said, (in tournament rules) if the first player for one reason or another accidentally does not make their first play across the center tile and then hits their clock (signaling the end of their turn), the second player has the option to point this out and make the first player ...

Learning and retaining a bunch of words is easy; any basic flashcard system can help you do that. However, all those fancy Scrabble words you stuff into your brain won't help you win any tournaments unless you can get them back out again on demand. The tricky part isn't retention, it's recall. Now, ideally, you want to start learning new words when you're ...

The word legality rules of Quiddler appear to be slightly more relaxed than those of Scrabble - according to Wikipedia, capitalized adjectives such as "Iraqi" and "Scottish" are acceptable in Quiddler, where to the best of my knowledge they still aren't in Scrabble. Archaic words, by contrast, have always been allowed in Scrabble. Again per Wikipedia: ...

Speaking as a bit of a two-letter word aficionado, I like the nonsensical colourfulness of the competitive Scrabble player's vocabulary, but given that you don't... there is absolutely nothing stopping you from using a (relatively) small and concise dictionary, of the kind that you can buy for cheap at any bookshop. These dictionaries are guaranteed not to ...

Slang words are 100% allowed in Scrabble - well, as long as they've been around long enough to have found their way into the dictionary. The idea that slang is in some way verboten in Scrabble is mysteriously widespread among casual players I've run across. I defy them to find that prohibition in the actual rules! "Za" is a fairly recent addition to the ...

Yes, you score it twice as long as the double/triple letter/word tile was covered up by your current play. From the rules: When two or more words are formed in the same play, each is scored. The common letter is counted (with full premium value, if any) for each word. (See Turns 3, 4 and 5 in the Scoring Examples

As xiaohouzi (little monkey?) said, "bingo" comes from the game of Bingo. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "bingo" comes from the word "bing" for a pile of something. In this case, presumably, it would be a pile of coins that you win for getting the right pattern on your card. The word "bing" is an old-fashioned word but still in use in ...

There are two well-known Scrabble AIs. One is the commercial Maven which is made by Atari and bundles with most official Scrabble versions. The alternative is called Quackle and is free open-source and of comparable strength.

In addition to the comments made by other users, it should be noted that the ENABLE+ list used by Words with Friends and the North American Scrabble tournament lexicon, the Official Tournament and Club Word List, 2nd Edition (OTCWL2) are practically identical for the vast majority of words used casual, beginner, and intermediate tournament play. The most ...

I searched Changes to the Box Top Rules, 1949 - 1999 and found the following clarification was made in 1953: 1953: If a word is formed that covers two premium WORD squares, the score is doubled and then re-doubled (4 times letter count), or tripled and then re-tripled (9 times letter count) as the case may be. Nowhere in the rules was there any mention ...

Answer: A solution that doesn't change the rules of the game is to provide all players with a list of all valid two-letter words. I have tried this methodology and it works fairly well for equalizing the playing field which is part of the subtext of the question. Explanation: One of the underlying problems of your question is the line between casual ...

To add to thesunneversets' answer: The words allowed in Quiddler are those in a pre-agreed dictionary of the players' choice. Similarly for Scrabble, the players may agree on a dictionary. However, there are also word lists compiled especially for Scrabble. In (English language) tournaments in most countries, as well as for the World Scrabble ...

Here's a nice picture of a Spanish tileset that I found: http://gtoal.com/wordgames/details/spanish/ That page links through to the FISE webpages (Federacion Internacional de Scrabble en Espanol), where it is claimed that as of 2009: El diccionario oficial de Scrabble es la versión 1.0-2003 (edición electrónica) del Diccionario de la lengua española ...

I like Ryan Cavanaugh's suggestion of eliminating all/most 2 letter words. The board game Upwords does something similar to this by requiring that when changing a word (upward), you must use two tiles as a minimum. You probably should blacklist all 2-letter words, and their 3-letter plurals, or at least the high value ones. JO, KA, KI, QI, EX, XI, XU, ...

Apparently there is enough of a concern, because according to the latest tournament rules: Tiles that can be distinguished by feel are not permitted, except as deemed appropriate by the Director for players who are blind. In addition, to keep players from swapping tiles with adjacent games: Adjacent games should not use identical tiles. My finger ...

You could have a house rule that you can only play a word if you can give (a reasonable close version of) the definition. That would eliminate the problem of players who memorise the word lists, but still leaves you with a general problem that somebody with a larger vocabulary will play a word his opponent hasn't heard of. I don't think that's soluble: ...

The article says that the changing dictionary has changed the values of letters, and this seems like a very good point. For example, the existence of a single word, ZA, listed as entering the language in the mid-late 60s, makes the Z much easier to play. (I wish I had an old dictionary to figure out when the even-more-important QI entered English ...

Facebook Scrabble uses the new dictionary. This can also be played via your iPhone (connects to the same same servers, so players on different platforms may play). The iPhone version has single-player. Quadplex is another site that hosts Scrabble.

Something that no other answer seems to have touched upon, that I feel like is worth mentioning, is that playing tiles moves the game closer to its conclusion, whereas swapping tiles slows down the progress of the game. Playing a six-letter word like EUOUAE for fewer than 10 points may just be inferior than swapping them, if your opponent is ahead and you ...

Use the Scrabble Dictionary for further reference. Slang words such as za and zn are recognized even if they don't seem to look like a word. In this lens - http://www.squidoo.com/scrabble-solver-words-that-begins-with-z - you will find more awkward words yet they are recognized.

If it doesn't cause too many fights, and you're only playing casually, you could allow/disallow words democratically. If a player uses "QI" and the other players decide it's "ridiculous", then they must take it back. If it's a word like "QI" which normally is valid (as opposed to "SPLUX" or "DEFKASARJ" which are not valid by any metric) you could allow the ...

The tile distribution is different, as are the tile values. Scrabble WWF Letter (#, Value) (#,Value) A (9,1) (9,1) B (2,3) (2,4) C (2,3) (2,4) D (4,2) (5,2) E (12,1) (13,1) F (2,4) (2,4) G (3,2) (3,3) H (2,4) (4,3) I (9,1) (8,1) J (1,8) ...