Scrabble

Scrabble is probably one of the most famous and most played word games. It was created in the 1930s in the United States.

There are official federations that regularly organize tournaments for their champions in several languages, including English, French and Spanish, but the game is played all over the world in just about every language on the planet, or at least every language with an alphabet allowing it.

Rules of the game

The object of the game is to place letters on a 15x15 grid to form words, like in a crossword puzzle.

Each new word must reuse one or more letters already present, and gives points according to the letters that compose it. The longer a word is and the more rare letters it uses, the more points it is worth.

For example, in the English version, the letter E is worth 1 point, while the letter Z is worth 10 points. The blank tiles can represent any letter of the player's choice, but are not worth any points.

In addition, some squares on the grid give bonuses. A letter placed on a double letter or triple letter square, as the name suggests, is counted as double or triple. A double word or triple word square doubles or triples the score of the entire word created.

Game round

On their turn, the player places one or more letters on the grid to form new words or complete existing ones, reusing letters already present.

When the player has finished placing letters, they draw as many as necessary from the bag to have 7 letters again on the next turn.

At this point, all the words in the grid must be valid. If not, the move is cancelled, the player takes back their letters and the hand passes to the next player. On the Playroom, depending on the rules chosen, the move is simply refused, or a penalty is applied.

Instead of placing letters on the grid, the player may also decide to exchange one or more letters. In this case, they put the letters they want to get rid of back into the bag, and draw the same amount of new letters. They can exchange all their letters if they wish.

They obviously score 0 points for this turn.

No letters can be exchanged if there are 7 letters or less left in the bag.

End of the game

The game ends when the bag is empty and a player has no more letters in their hand, or when the situation is completely blocked.

The situation is considered to be completely blocked when there are no more letters in the bag to make an exchange, and three complete rounds have passed without anyone touching the grid.

Scoring

Valid words

All common nouns from 2 to 15 letters are accepted, including plurals, as well as all conjugated verbs in all their forms.

However, proper nouns are not accepted, nor are most foreign words.

Languages with recognized organizations have an official reference dictionary that is periodically updated.

Since these books are not free, the Playroom has its own dictionaries, filled in from various sources found on the Internet. They are probably somewhat incomplete and necessarily differ from the official dictionaries.

Examples

If the word "TEST" is present on the grid horizontally:

On the other hand, if in addition to "TEST", the word "RAGE" is present horizontally elsewhere on the grid:

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