We got this from a friend of ours named Gabe, so it is appropriately called “Gabe Rules” in our household. (Hold up your hand in the classic hard-rock thumb, index, and pinkie fingers out gesture for maximum effect.)
Anyway, everything is the same as the classic Scrabble rules, with one exception. You are allowed to take one tile off an already existing word, provided that you replace it with a tile from your rack that keeps the word it was taken from meaningful (but it does not have to be the same letter), and you must use the tile you pick up in that turn. For example, if the word ‘steed’ was on the board, you could pick up the ‘p’, replace it with a ‘d’, and use the ‘p’ somewhere else in that turn. No points are given for the word with the replaced letter (steed, in this case), unless your entirely new word adds to it (if you placed a word that added an ‘s’ onto steed, thus making ‘steeds’).
We’ve found that this adds an average 75-100 points to our scores (X gets reused a lot, passed from one word to another), but really it’s just fun to try and work with not only your 7 rack tiles, but keeping in mind that any tile on the board is fair game, if you can replace it. It also keeps the blanks in constant rotation, because if you can replace a blank that’s on the board with one of your tiles, hey, you’ve got another blank!
If the blank is used as an x, for example, you can replace it with the actual “x” tile (no points are given.)
What ever the total of the remaing tiles is, you owe me in chores. This is a rule my brothers and I used because we are rather ruthless. If you get stuck with the Q you are so screwed.
I like Gabes Rules. The only alternative I have played is where a broad subject is chosen before the game starts, and words that go with the subject score double (also propper nouns that go with the subject are legal to play). So a nerdy star wars game will allow LUKE to be played as an automatic double word score.
I’m not sure it is all that good, too many fights on how to spell Besperin (sp?) unless you have some good source books at hand. Usually we would vote to see if we believed someone when they try something too obscure.
Anyway, I once played “Austalian Rules” That is, each word must be completely fictional. You lay down the word and then make up a definition for it.
We had quite a few 8 letter words that game. I won by waiting until my last play to build on another word and get points for both. No one had thought of that and I wanted to be the only one to reap benefit from it.
We found when I was a kid that playing Scrabble just takes too damn long. So we made these house rules:
you may play as many words as you can on a turn, rather than one word per turn.
-you add a suffix or prefix to a word already on the board, you get all the points for that word.
-you can use a person’s name as a word IF that person is in the room (I used to snag extra points with the cats’ names).
-no dictionary challenges during the game, but if you play a word, you better know what it means. If, after the game, that word or definition is found to be invalid, you have to wash the dishes the next night.
I think so, but in the “real” rules you can only play one word per turn, so if you added a suffix you’d be using maybe three letter tiles, tops. Under our rules, you can keep adding words to the board, increasing the chances that you will get the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.
You get all the points on the tiles, but you don’t get any credit for any double letter or word scores that have already been used. However, if the pre/suffix itself lands on one of these squares, you can use it.
My father and I always counted all the points in the words we added to plus any new words (this meant if there were any double, triple squares under the word added to that was used). It made for high scores, especially if you got a double/double, triple/trible or triple/double word. It also changes the strategy of the game. [sup]You get an “X” on a triple letter and I’m going to get 25 points for “ax” or “ox”.[/sup]
Similar to the way we used to play in college, except that there was no double scoring and just a short list of broad subjects… a very short list. Usually, it was one of the following:
Words must relate to sex, drugs, or rock and roll.
Words must be profanities, insults or scatalogical in general.
The rules were enforced pretty loosely, and proper nouns were permitted. We were generally stoned after all. So for instance, “leery” would be valid for the first variation, because it is a homophone for “Leary,” who, of course, was a major LSD icon.
Oh, and then there was Speed Scrabble, where there were no turns, everyone just played words simultaneoulsy as fast as we could. That was great fun with alcohol.
Blank tiles count for whatever points they’d count for if they were actually the letter you’re using them for. That’s how someone I was playing with a couple of days ago got more than 50 points for JA_Z–her blank was a Z.
I also like to play with nine tiles at a time instead of seven.
Proper nouns are out, except for “Zebrowski.” If you make that, you get an extra 50 points. There was always a gasp if somebody made “brow.” We’d eye each other suspiciously, wondering if anyone had the rest.
Zebrowski was the name of a demolition company that imploded big buildings.
But that leads to people playing something like “gurgleflackit” and when you ask them to use it in a sentence, they say, “I played the word ‘gurgleflackit’ in Scrabble.”
I dunno if this really counts as a Scrabble variant, since it involves ditching the board, but we use the Scrabble tiles, so I think it counts. I suspect that this is actually an official variant of the game (or another real game entirely), but it was introduced to me as a homebrewed Scrabble variant, so now I present it to you.
As mentioned above, you don’t use the board. The game starts by putting an assortment of tiles in the center of the playing field. There are no turns, either. Whenever a player can make a word using the letters in the center, they can just take the tiles and the word becomes “theirs.”
The catch is this: if you can make a new word by combining another player’s existing word(s) (or even one of your own words) with additional tiles from the center, you can steal their word, and it now becomes yours.
[sup]You get an “X” on a triple letter and I’m going to get 25 points for “ax” or “ox”.[/sup]