Scrabble Studies 111(1st Edition)

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Book Price $0 : Practice makes perfect, and so does studying Spoiler Scrabble masterstrokes. Spoiler Scrabble builds upon the pencil-and-paper game of dots-and-boxes.Spoiler Scrabble is played with two identical boards laid out with square boxes and with two bags of square tiles. The boards and bags are paired up. One bag contains single-letter tiles. Its board is meant to be tiled with the letters A-Z. The other bag contains single-digit tiles. Its board is meant to be tiled with the digits 0-9.Spoiler Scrabble does NOT support either the classic Scrabble DLS-, DWS-, TLS- and TWS-square premiums or the classic Scrabble tile values. The single-letter tiles are worthless! Only the single-digit tiles count! Spoiler Scrabble - like dots-and-boxes - is played for board share.Spoiler Scrabble is played with 2-10 players all but one of which are designated as "regulars". The "irregular" steps in whenever a regular forfeits their turn as a consequence of their not being able to make a move, in the classic Scrabble sense, given (a) the state of the classic Scrabble board and (b) the combination of single-letter tiles on their classic Scrabble rack. If the irregular succeeds in making a move then the game resumes. The game is not over until the irregular is unable to make a move.Both boards are tiled each move. One board is tiled in the classic Scrabble sense with the letters spelling out the word (or the orthogonal words) formed pursuant to the move. The other board is tiled (one-for-one) with tiles labeled with the digits 1-9 identifying the player making the move. The irregular is player '0'.In the game of dots-and-boxes, only unflagged boxes are flaggable; once a box is flagged the box-and-player affiliation is irrevocable; there is a tipping point early on when the outcome has effectively already been determined; and the typical endgame is garbage time and, moreover, to a lesser degree, the same can be said of classic Scrabble.Spoiler Scrabble eliminates garbage time without having to resort to a mercy rule.Tiled words are anchor-points for longer words. The impact of shorter words being subsumed into longer words is amplified in Spoiler Scrabble. Spoiler Scrabble is a zero-sum game because flagged boxes can be flipped. The boxes-and-players affiliations are final when the game is over.In Spoiler Scrabble, no player (even the designated irregular) is ever a lame duck. At a bare minimum, every player can be a spoiler. Trailing Spoiler Scrabble players are empowered to knock the leading Spoiler Scrabble players off their perches. Spoiler Scrabble is more competitive than classic Scrabble, much less dots-and-boxes. The player ending up with the most flagged boxes wins.The regulars "draw straws" each round to establish the order in which they will take their turns that round. Nine regulars designated “1”-“9” play racks respectively nine-fifteen single-letter tiles in capacity. A full rack of single-letter tiles are drawn from the appropriate bag at the onset of each turn. At the conclusion of each turn any tiles left on the rack are returned to the bag from which they came.The contents of three classic Scrabble bags of single-letter tiles are merged into a single, outsized bag - with the exception of the total of six faceless tiles - the latter being simply excluded from consideration. The 294 single-letter tiles in play far exceed the 225 squares on the board. A player never "passes their turn". Neither bag is ever empty. The census of the single-letter tiles on the pertinent rack at the onset of a turn is never at less than full capacity.Spoiler Scrabble does not support the swapping of single-letter tiles in the classic Scrabble sense. Instead, all of the single-letter tiles that are not on the board are momentarily consolidated on behalf of the designated irregular. See more