The Board Layout in Scrabble

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Andy Strohl and on behalf of Expert Village, in this clip we will be talking about the Scrabble board itself. Don’t forget to check out my work at www.strohldigital.com. Okay, here is the Scrabble board in all its glory. This is the traditional Scrabble board and is the folding variety. They actually make a variety now that spins so that as play moves to the left, you can also spin the board so that all the words are always facing you. The difficulty with this board is that sometimes you will have to look at the word diagonally or from the side or upside down. So keep that in mind when playing. Now the actual board structure itself consists of the star in the center of the board which is denotes exactly where the play starts. As long as your first word includes that star, it does not matter where it is. The first word of course has to be 4 letters long so this is where game starts. As you can see diagonally from that star, is a square that says double letter score. Then diagonally down from that, triple letter score and double word score. Now double letter score is just that. The tile that lands on this square gets double, so for example an e was on that square and you use a 1 value, it becomes 2 just for a letter. Same with triple letter score. So letter was a 2 like a g, it would become 6 points and this is a really good one, the double word score. Again, just what it indicates the total score is doubled when any letter of that word is included on a double word score and finally the mother of all placements on this board is the triple word score. They are exactly what they say. It is 3 times the amount of the total word score if any of the tiles from that word hit this box. Very important box; needs to be played with great care. We will discuss this a little bit later and also how to avoid setting yourself up for your opponent to use one of these triple board scores. "