Super Scrabble is like regular Scrabble but superer. It has a 21x21 board (as opposed to 15x15) and 200 tiles (as opposed to 100.) And there are bonus squares up to quadruple word score. I was considering getting one a few months ago, but I couldn’t find a deluxe version (with the raised grid that holds the tiles in place.)
Well, I looked again today and found that they are now selling Super Scrabble Deluxe! I just might have to buy myself one for Secular Mid-Winter Gift-Giving-Or-Not Day.
Anybody ever play this game? How does it compare to the traditional variety? According to some thing I read, the middle 15x15 section on the Super Scrabble board is identical to the traditional Scrabble board, so you can play both on the same board.
I haven’t played it myself, but I can direct you to some people who have. You might want to check out their thoughts on the update before deciding if it’s for you.
I just got the Deluxe edition as a gift a few weeks ago. The first time I played, with a friend who isn’t all that into the game, we stopped about halfway through. It was just too much for him.
The second time I played my grandmother, finished, and we both fully enjoyed it.
I love having more room in the beginning, but you still have to get creative with finding a spot later on in the game. It’s fun adding up the points when you hit the new bonus squares, too. One play was a 5-letter word laid over 2 double-word squares, giving me quadruple word points!
And yes, the original board is still there - the shading is different between the two. The setup isn’t perfectly even as it is in the original Scrabble; one side of the board is slightly different from the other.
One thing I didn’t like was the missing list of letters. In regular Scrabble, there’s a box on the left giving you how many tiles for each letter - Super Scrabble doesn’t have that. With the increased number of tiles (more Zs and Qs!), I really wish they’d kept that feature.
Wasn’t that hard to fill in in three directions, but somehow filling in to the upper left was hard.
We seemed to get really skewed sets of letters in our trays. All (or almost all) vowels or a lot of QZHF type things. With a larger set to draw from, I guess it’s easier to land in the edges of the bell curve with a fixed size draw.
One of the house rules is that I can’t play a seven letter word. Didn’t even come close this time.
BTW, it’s a regular fold-out board. Which made turning the board impractical. Go with the lazy-susan version.
Also, you really have to watch the cats more carefully.
That’s quite odd, then. Here’s a photo of my board. You can see the differences in F4 versus O4, G6 versus P6, and G19 versus P19.
I wonder what happened. Maybe I just got a faulty board.
I’m glad it’s just me, then, because we were really wondering why they’d screw with the format in such a kooky way.
That’s interesting. There’s at least three people’s boards in the images there and all of them lack the changes that Lionne’s board has. Lionne’s says that it’s Super Scrabble Deluxe so it may be that the “Deluxe” one could be considered a different game…
Shoot, I didn’t even catch that! I demand a refund!
Actually, it was a gift, bought by my grandmother online. I’m going to let her know that I got a screwy board. I’m sure she’ll take it up with the company.
Deluxe version or not…why would the board itself change? Add features and whatnot, but don’t alter the game!
According to Wiki, the highest scoring play (in North America) was QUIXOTRY for 365 points.
There was a website I found a while back that had all kinds of interesting records for Scrabble games. I’ll do a little digging.
