Just finished a game of Scrabble with my wife, and we managed to play every letter tile. I haven’t played thousands of games in my life, but I can only remember one other game where this happened. Is this truly an uncommon event, or does it depend somehow on the number of players?
I’ve always played Scrabble where the game ends when there are no more letters in the bag to pick and the first person uses up all of their letters. I don’t know how you could possibly have every tile played, because someone would use all of theirs first and thus end the game.
That’s the way you are supposed to play. The rules say that the game ends either when there are no more letters in the bag and one player uses all of their letters, or if you get to a point where no other plays can be made and all players are stuck. Once one player goes out, you’re done. It shouldn’t be possible to use up all of the tiles.
I suppose you could continue to play after one player goes out, but that’s not what the rules say.
Mrs. Geek and I have been playing for decades and I think we’ve ended up stuck only once or twice in all that time. Usually we end up with one of us going out and the other only having a couple of letters left. If we continued to play we’d probably use up all of the tiles most of the time.
Knowing all of the two letter words helps.
Yep, a couple weeks ago my wife and I were playing and she used the last of her tiles and was 4 points ahead. I had one tile left and played it to get 6 points and announced I won! A miraculous finish!
My wife said, nope, when she used all her tiles the game was done. A careful examination of the rules revealed she was right. 
Plus she should have gotten the points from the letters that you still held.
Yes, it was a one-point letter, so she ended up winning by 5 points, not 4. Thus let the record be set straight.
ETA: also just for the record, I don’t think the winner gets the leftover tile points from the loser, the loser’s leftover tiles get deducted from the loser’s final score. Or, even more accurately, both winner and loser have to deduct any leftover tiles from their final score.
It’s both. She won by six.
https://scrabble.hasbro.com/en-us/rules Unplayed Letters: When the game ends, each player’s score is reduced by the sum of his or her unplayed letters. In addition, if a player has used all of his or her letters, the sum of the other players’ unplayed letters is added to that player’s score.
Ah ok, good to know, thanks!
I’m going to be a bit specific. Here is the first sentence of the OP:
“Just finished a game of Scrabble with my wife, and we managed to play every letter tile.”
This is technically possible if you stick with “every letter tile.”
I’ve played three games of Scrabble every Wednesday for the last 14 years. In that time Ben and I can recall two instances when a player had one of the blank tiles left in their rack when another player went out. In my book a blank tile is not a letter tile. You might disagree.
@ASGuy - Nope, it was us forgetting how the rules work. While we do keep score, at the end of the game we like to cooperate and try to use all of the remaining tiles, letter or blank, just to see if we can.
@engineer_comp_geek, in the game I managed to place an M on a triple letter score square, adjacent to two E’s so I made 2 ME’s, for a sweet 20 points from placing a single letter. My wife was not amused…
Coincidentally, Mrs. Geek and I played scrabble earlier tonight and she did something similar, 19 points for a single well-placed letter.
Frustratingly, I had a 7 letter word later in the game but couldn’t make it fit anywhere on the board.
I’ve gotten 60pt scores off of one letter before. Knowing the 2-letter Q, Z and X words is really useful!
[Moderating]
Moving from MPSIMS to the Game Room.