Words With ScrabbleScrabble, Words With Friends, Lexulous

Review by Millicent Aynes for Scrabble Champion Edition
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I enjoy playing this game. It is fun to let the game pick words I haven’t heard of and the dictionary is excellent for checking words I think I remember is a word. You might call this a global word game for the new words. I cannot beat the game. It is great for one person to play alone.

Review by L. Walz for Scrabble Champion Edition
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No need to say more than this is an excellent electronic version of the classic board game. Just wanted to let folks know that it runs just fine on Vista, and happily, Windows 7 too. Whew!

Review by V. Vera for Scrabble Champion Edition
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The only thing that sucks about this is that you need to have the disk in the drive to use the program. For the price, it’s ok. However, I don’t blame the seller.

Review by Bernard P. Stavash for Scrabble Champion Edition
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All forms of Scrabble are great as is this one. However, the DVD’s response is too rapid to follow along; all of a sudden, it’s on the board. This game automatically inserts its hint which may not be my final choice. Instructions are too involved and detailed. Scrabble players don’t need all those directions as most people begin playing the game from a boxed version.

Review by K. Manno for Scrabble Express
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Anyone who loves regular Scrabble will enjoy playing this cute little game in its well-designed, tidy, round carrying case. Perfect for a fast lunchtime game, but it will never replace Mama Scrabble. The game includes a board which unfolds into a cute cardboard miniature, a high quality fuzzy little bag for the letter cubes, concise directions, a 1-minute optional timer, a notepad & pencil. There’s no “Q”, but rather “Qu” which is probably a good idea, but there ARE some great Q-words that don’t use a “u” such as Qi, Qat, etc. so just make a rule “qu” can be substituted with just “Q”. The unfolding game board will wear out over time… it’d be a good idea to laminate it, but I wish Hasbro had done it. There’s a bit of a problem getting the board to lay flat. Only two plays are ever on the board at one time… once player #2 makes his word and records his score, player #1’s word is removed for the next person’s play. This makes for some interesting opportunities and creates quite a different strategy than real Scrabble. There are four triple word squares and so far, while I’ve played, no one has ever reached one of them. When playing you must look directly over the board because the cubes are high, and at an angle you can’t see the color squares. Rolling the dice can be a bit noisy. Over-all I rate this a 5-star because I enjoyed it and adore Scrabble. Sometimes it’ll be fun to play this quick (IF you use the one minute “hour-glass”) version. Great for people who can’t stand the length of time it takes to play regular Scrabble. I think I’ll try the Monopoloy Express game too.

Review by Patrick C. Kenney for Scrabble Express
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This game is broken.

In normal scrabble, triple word score is a one-time windfall. In scrabble express, it ends the game.

What happens is this:

1. You make the game-losing blunder of going anywhere near triple word score.

2. I manage to play on the TWS square.

3. You play off my word.

4. Before I play again, my word from step 2 is removed from the board, re-exposing the triple word score square. It’s guaranteed I have a chance to hit TWS again because you had to leave one of my original word’s letters on the board.

5. If I can play on that letter, go back to step 2.

This loop means that I triple score EVERY SINGLE TURN, while you never do. And there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can stall it for a turn by playing into the letter on the TWS so it doesn’t open, but that won’t escape the repeated abuse of TWS, only delay it.

There is only one reasonable way out of this loop: I get an unlucky roll and cannot make any word at all that plays on TWS square. But even when that happens, you don’t get your chance because now the word is not in line with TWS.

I noticed this pattern going on with a double word score square the first time I played, and ever since then this sort of repeating lock has become the dominant feature of the game.

My girlfriend will probably never play me again because the last time we played I won 200 to 75 by playing over and over and over and over on the triple word score after she made the mistake of playing a letter on the edge row. (What a gentleman!)

Now that we’ve seen how critical it is, I’m sure she’ll never play to the edge row again, but you START the game on a double word score square, so probably the correct strategy in this game is for whoever wins the initial die roll to camp that star square (which is a double) for the entire game.

I give this game three stars because it seems to have potential for fun, but the dominance of this looped abuse of the premium square is so central to the game and so one-sided and boring when it happens, that it’s not very fun.

It may be an interesting strategy game about evading these loop-traps, but that’s a bit more brutal than the light, friendly lunchtime word game I was shopping for.

Review by Melanie D. Mcbride for Scrabble Express
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This is a great game where you play one word at a time (meaning that there are only ever two words at a time on the board). It’s a clever adaptation of the original game, and we like it much better than the Monopoly Express. The Monopoly Express has the feeling of a game that is a seriously dumbed down version of the original whereas Scrabble Express is a fun game in its own right. As far as durability, the game board folds into quarters, and our 3-year-old managed to tear it in two fairly easily.

Review by Anonymous for Scrabble Express
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Scrabble Express

I bought this game as a gift for my niece who is a sophmore in college and she loves it! The game is limited to 20 minutes (there is a timer), so it’s just the right amount of time to play between classes or for a study break. Plus it’s educational… or at least somewhat challanging to the mind. It’s a very clever product that should be a winner for the Hasbro company.

Review by Maj the Jaguar for Scrabble Express
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Someone on here mentioned that Scrabble Express is, per its published rules system, “broken” because the first player to play off the TWS will most certainly get to play it again and again and win quickly. The same was mentioned for the center star square, a DWS, which can be similarly abused by the player going first.

This analysis is correct and can make the game one-sided. After purchasing this game, as I have played the original game professionally, it would make sense for players to develop a series of “house rules” to overcome these issues. Here are my own suggestions:

1) If a player hits a TWS, they should score the play, then clear the ENTIRE board of dice and have the next player begin again at the center square.

2) To make the center square less abusive, it should double the value of the first word played there ONLY ONCE, but be a regular non-bonus square thereafter. This would seem to encourage players to move away from the center and bring the other DWS’s and other bonus squares into play. When the dice would be cleared from the board entirely, then it could be a true DWS again.

3) Regarding the “Qu” die face, while it kind of sucks that it’s not just “Q,” it should be left the way it is, but perhaps a bingo involving this face could be considered valid with only 5 other die faces, since “Qu” is still 2 letters, for a total of 7. In other words, one could consider playing a 6-die-face, 7-letter “Qu” word a bingo. (One example could be ESQuIRE.) Perhaps you could also have an additional bonus for the inclusion of a 7th die face to use this way for making an “eight-letter” word.

These problems aside, it makes for a fun, short game. What I particularly like is that it forces players to learn the short words (2-4 letters), which make up roughly 70-75% of your score in the original game. Note that the two middle row/middle column DLS are positioned three, rather than four (in the boardgame), squares away from the center. This makes four-letter words very potent to begin the game, especially if you roll letters with face values of at least 3 points. Four-letter J, K, X, and Z words and “five-letter” “Qu” words will be devastating on turn one. Opportunities to score this high in the board game are sometimes hard to come by.

The focus for short words is a good one here, because even after doing some personal play-testing of my own, to get a feel for the mechanics, and looking at the letter distribution on the combined 72 die faces, it would appear that getting a bingo roll is very difficult, much more so than drawing a bingo rack from a 100-tile bag at the beginning of the board game. I did once roll AEIMNST to make the word INMATES, but that was the only bingo roll out of about 300-400 rolls of seven dice. It is very easy to roll the letters that are non-conducive to bingos in Scrabble Express, simply because it is easy to draw the dice containing those faces.

It’s otherwise a very nicely designed and packaged game, and is easily packed in a small bag or backpack for road travel. The cylindrical pod is a nice touch and I think the quartered board is attractive. All in all, a nice little game for a good price.