People love to socialize. They love going to coffee shops and pubs where they can spend time with their best friends and enjoy their favorite beverages. Unfortunately, due to the current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, people are forced to stay at home and avoid socialization. This can be rather frustrating for some people, but, fortunately, there’s a simple way to make your stay at home more interesting. All you have to do is dust off the old Scrabble box and challenge a family member to a duel.
If you enjoy playing Scrabble and, more importantly, if you like to win, you’ve come to the right place. Today we are going to talk about tips and tricks you can use to win your next Scrabble game.
Let’s see what they are.
Don’t Discard Your Tiles
Every once in a while you will feel like all of your letters are completely useless. This is something every single Scrabble player experiences at least once. It’s not a great feeling, especially if you are losing the game. In this situation, it would seem logical to simply exchange the tiles and get something better. However, exchanging your tiles means that you forfeit your turn. This gives your opponent a serious advantage and there’s no guarantee that you will get better tiles. Therefore, the safest option is to simply play a two or three-letter word.
If you have trouble finding a good word, you can always use a word-finding tool to practice when you are not playing. As you probably know, unscrambling words can be rather complicated, therefore, using a tool like this to practice will definitely bring you good results in Scrabble. It will also help you improve your vocabulary.
Study the Dictionary
Don’t get us wrong, we are not saying that you should read a dictionary from cover to cover. However, reading it every once in a while and looking for interesting words that contain letters like Q and Z will definitely help you to improve your score in this fun game. Reading books, in general, will help you learn new words and become a better Scrabble player.
Try Not to Place a Common Letter on the Middle Square
As you probably know, the game starts with all players randomly picking a tile. Then, they draw their racks. The player who gets the letter closest to A has the right to go. This provides him or her with the added bonus of using the center star. If you are that fortunate player, make sure to avoid using vowels, S, D, R letters, or the letter T there. Using those letters will make it easy for the next player to find a good word and reach the triple-word scores at the edges. Your number one priority is, of course, to play a good and valuable word, but you should also be careful not to help the other players. Scrabble is not chess, but you should plan one step ahead. This will definitely help you get the win.
Look for Prefixes and Suffixes
Scrabble is a fun game, but it can also be rather frustrating. This is especially true when you simply can’t find a good word to play. This usually happens later in the game when it’s difficult to use the tiles you have. However, there’s one simple trick that can help you in this situation. If you can’t use your tiles to make your own word, use the letters you have to modify the existing word on the board. In other words, look for prefixes and suffixes. For example, if there’s the word “watch” on the board, and you don’t have anything good to play, you can simply add the suffix “ing” and form a new word “watching”. This is one of the simplest ways to earn points in Scrabble.
Learn How to Use Small Words to Your Advantage
A lot of people tend to discount two or three-letter words when playing Scrabble. Yes, in most cases, a longer word will get you more points, but small words can also improve your score if played strategically. Therefore, try to use the approved small words like QI, JO, XI, XU, AX, OX, EX, and ZA whenever you have the chance.
Scrabble is a wonderful game and you should definitely play it with your family to pass the time. However, if you really want to win and become a better player, make sure to apply some of the things we talked about today.
