used to play multi-board scrabble – four boards, four sets of tiles, and words could stretch from from one board to another. also good for when you have more than four players.
another we’d play is the scrabble race – each player has their own scrabble board & set of tiles, and at the start draws seven tiles. you then start making words on your own board, replacing tiles as they are used (i.e four letter play, then you draw four tiles.) but you can rearrange already played tiles, as long as it makes real words, and the first person to play every tile in their set wins the game.
A good one we’ve used (theme Scrabble) is Tolkien-scrabble, words from elvish, dwarvish, etc can be used. They don’t have to be words that appeared in the text either, since the LOTR appendix has roots of elvish, you can construct your own words from the roots.
My family always played by what the OP knows as Gabe’s Rule, but with an unlimited number of letter substitions from the player’s rack to the board on a given turn, and without the stipulation that traded letters must be used in the next play (although they usually were). This meant that from about a third of the way through the game to its end, a single turn could take upwards of an hour while the player swapped out his rack letter by letter with the ultimate goal of producing a hangable 7-letter word.
My mother once baked a cake in the time it took my dad to play a word.
The downside of regularly playing this way (apart from the marathon-length games), is that it has unsuited me for regular Scrabble play. I waste my time pining away for the letters I could get and the words I could make if only the family rules were in force.
My only idea of “alternate rules” is, if you play off the tile I was eyeing for a huge play on my next turn, it is perfectly acceptable for me to pelt you with popcorn.
Occasionally, we’ll play with a rule that you can put down any word as long as it generally follows standard English spelling rules and you can define it.
In other words, you can’t put “grxpplf”. But you could spell “gargate”, which is when you gargle Colgate.
Nine tiles instead of seven, making bingos far more common; and
Before you start your turn, you can replace a blank tile on the board with the letter it’s meant to represent.
We also play the pseudoscrabble that MilTan describes. It’s really great cutthroat fun; I actually like it better in many ways than regular Scrabble. It encourages quick thinking.
MilTan–the game you’re describing is called Anagrams. Very popular in the pro-Scrabble community as an after hours diversion. Here are some pictures of us playing it in New Orleans this August (first three on the page; links don’t work because I only have room for thumbs on my webspace, not full pictures).
Other variants:
Clabbers: a “word” is good if it anagrams into a valid word. So you can play DGO, or example, because DOG is a word (GOD too). Someone could then play AOT parallel to that, making AD, OG, and TO in the process, which is okay since GO is an anagram of OG, and AOT=OAT.
Any tile a blank Scrabble. You can flip over one tile on every rack to make it a blank. This guarantees a high score on virtually every turn.
You spread the tiles around the table face up, and you can pick and choose however many you want to make a word. However, any tile you pick up from the pile is worth -1 point. You get the full positive point value for tiles in your word that are already on the board. Thus the purpose is to make words intersecting the existing valuable tiles, and using as many of them as possible. Also, to try to avoid placing valuable tiles on the board so your enemy can’t use them and get points.