Double Score for Naughty Words: Fun House Rules for Scrabble
The great thing about board games is you can play them however you want. It boggles my mind that Scrabble has stayed so much the same decade over decade, given how much more interesting it can be with a few house rules. Check out some of these great ideas to switch things up the next time you play.
Anti-Scrabble
It’s a challenge to make up words that don’t already exist. You should try it in Scrabble! If a word is in the dictionary, it doesn’t count.
Now, it wouldn’t be very fun if you could just play five “T” tiles in a row and call it good. No, Anti-Scrabble requires you to make words that follow the rules and conventions of English. This way, everyone has to really consider if they want to challenge your placement of SPLITE for 74 points. Is it a word? Webster says no. Urban Dictionary says yes.
Evacuate Your Vowels
Want a truly bonkers way to play? Get rid of all the vowel tiles. Players have to make words as if the vowels are implied. For instance, WATER becomes just WTR.
This breaks the game in really fun ways, actually. Suddenly, crosswords become much easier to make! Inversely, it’s way more difficult to play multiple tiles at a time. The game board stays tight, and walking to the big score modifiers is a high-stakes race composed of equal parts tension and creativity.
If you can, I recommend combining two sets of Scrabble tiles for this. Things get crazy fast.
Board Walkers
Speaking of walking around the board, why limit yourself to just one? With two copies of scrabble, you can put both boards together and allow yourself to make words crossing between them.
You have a really big incentive to do so, as well. It’s not obvious at first, but this makes for a bunch of DW and TW spaces right next to each other, and hitting two of them in one play can make for some insane scores. Is it balanced? Heck no! Is it maybe the best thing ever? Absolutely.
HP Scrabble
In many games, “HP” stands for “health” or “hit points.” In HP Scrabble, you don’t score points until all the tiles are gone. Instead, you have 150 HP, and your opponent drains your health to zero.
This mode is useful for choosing how fast of a game you want to play by assigning more or less starting health. The stakes for each word increases as health decreases. If you’re overzealous with a big word, you might not eliminate your opponent and just leave yourself open for an even bigger attack.
There are ways to handle the advantage of going first. I suggest giving the second player an extra tile in his rack at the start, but you can also give him more HP or allow for a “last stand” play when HP reaches zero.
Word Expiration
There are some people that would love to see Scrabble games last longer. Those people are crazy, but they exist. Perhaps one of the most fun ways to do this is to expire words on the board after they’re played.
Keep a list of every word played, in order, and pick those tiles up off the board after three turns. This way, there are always new opportunities all around the board. It also adds a new layer of strategy, because if you can remember a score multiplier is opening up soon you can walk your way toward it. The only extra rule you might have to enact is a score limit. First person to 400 points wins?
Also, if you play a new word on the starting tile in the middle of the board, it’s worth double. After all, the official Scrabble Rules calls it a pink tile in the first place.
Double Score for Naughty Words
When the kids have gone to bed, you put away the Apples to Apples and break out the Cards Against Humanity. Why not do the same thing with Scrabble? The game gets a lot more fun when the goal is to find the funniest words instead of just the highest-scoring ones. That, and when you’re playing with a group just as deranged as you are, this otherwise serious game of anagrams becomes a tremendous source of laughter.
Feel free to add your own score multipliers for various kinds of naughtiness. Perhaps lazy curse words are just low-scoring four-letter plays, but “romantic” or scatological plays get a bonus. Maybe the bonuses stack if a word is both. That’s all up to you.
Scrabble RPG
If you like the idea of themed Scrabble bonuses, you can take it to the next level. You can role play a character, and choose a theme that doubles your score. Maybe you’re a cook, and your goal is to play any words related to pasta. Maybe you’re an artist, so you’re looking for words about color or painting. It’s a passive way to make the game more fun, and it balances against that smarty-pants who knows all the weird Q words every game.
If you want to make it a little more dicey, allow other players to damage your score by finding words in your theme. So if someone else finds that pasta word, it doesn’t give them bonus points but half of its value gets stricken from your total.
Doing this makes your choice of theme very important. You might pick one that’s easy to get lots of bonus words, but you’ll be susceptible to everyone else finding them too. If some player is way out ahead, the group can all find words within his theme to take him down. It’s super fun!
Cheater’s Scrabble
If you’ve got a group of three or four players around a real, physical scrabble board, you can be reasonably sure nobody’s cheating. But what if you specifically encourage everyone to cheat at the same time? After all, if everyone’s cheating, no one is.
As a cheat developer myself, I can already vouch for how fun this is as it’s been how we’ve tested everything for about a decade. If you’ll allow me to toot my own horn for a moment, I think you might find this style of play enjoyable as well.
The cool thing about this house rule is how you have to change the way you play when everyone knows each other is cheating. After all, the highest-scoring word is rarely the best one to use. You have to play defensively, knowing that your opponents could snap up valuable double and triple word spaces in an instant. You have to trick your opponents into leaving those spaces open, and you have to gamble extra hard on whether you keep or play your high-value tiles — reserving them just long enough so you can capitalize on your opponents’ mistakes.
The other nice thing about this rule is it makes for really fast games. You can do several “cheaters only” lightning rounds in a row, and even run little household tournaments. So long as everyone has a cell phone and a copy of Word Breaker, or is logged into a web version of it(for Scrabble | for Words With Friends), you’re ready to rock.