Scrabble resources
By John Fultz
Last modified on Thursday, July 12, 2007
Here are some of my favorite online Scrabble resources with some of my own yammering about each.
NASPA and tournament links
Upcoming tournaments
Player information
Online play and study
Internet Scrabble Club
Popularly known as ISC, this site is the most popular hangout for online play among tournament players. Many of the club members are on ISC. Check the sidebar for a list of their logins which you might want to add to your buddies list.
JumbleTime
This is a great site for word study and a lot of fun. Use it to help you study anything from 4's to 8's. Requires only a Java-capable web browser.
Word lookup and study tools
These are the essentials.
- Zyzzyva is the most prevalent, and certainly one of the most flexible, tools out there. I use it for building all of my word lists. It also has quizzing and flash-carding features which I personally find less useful, but some people find it helpful. It's available for PC, Mac, and Linux.
- Quackle is a free crossword game AI and analysis tool. It runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It has a choice of AI players. The dumbest (but still very good) is the "Quick Player", which simply makes the best play by analyzing the board and determining the play which will produce the best combination of high score, good board position, and good leave. The other players are better, as they start with the same analysis the quick player does, but then proceed to simulate lots of possible outcomes to determine the likelihood of a move producing good or bad results a couple of turns down the road. You can also enter your played games into Quackle, and use its simulator to determine where you might have made better moves.
- LAMPWords is an older program which runs on Palm and is very suited to the scaled-down hardware. It is no longer being maintained, but still in use by some in the Scrabble community.
- Mike Baron's WordBook is a great tool for organizing your word study. It's filled with stem lists, anamonics, and other sorts of useful word lists.
- Brow-Raisers is a book which focuses on the words you probably don't know. It has lots of useful lists, organized in ways you'll rarely find elsewhere, and with uncommon words or uncommon hooks to common words emphasized. If you use systems and patterns as memory aids rather than just consuming raw word or alphagram lists, you should strongly consider this book. Make sure you have the errata.
Other resources
I've read Everything Scrabble from cover to cover, solved the puzzles, and memorized the word lists. I like word lists, but what I really like is strategy and inside tips. Most of what I see on the web is stuff I already knew from Everything Scrabble. Here are a few links I have been able to find which added something genuinely interesting to that body of knowledge (experts already know this stuff, but we're not all experts yet!).
- Steve Pellinen's Journey from Novice to Expert. I never successfully tracked tiles until I read this, and it was Steve who first showed me that there was something just beyond the high fives that I was missing.
- G.I. Joel's Newbie's** First Scrabble(tm) Lesson. The principle lesson here is that Scrabble is a math game, which you must understand to be really good. I have an engineering background, so I picked up on this naturally, but many people don't.
- Can-Am 2002, the book. I'm not sure it's being sold anymore (all of the links I can find are dead), but if you're interested in deep expert analysis of expedrt games, you must track down this book.