Speed Scrabble Essentials
Speed Scrabble is a rapid spelling game. If you’ve ever played Bananagrams, you’ll be familiar with how Speed Scrabble instructions work. The differences between the two games come from using Scrabble’s letter tiles and the different methods for scoring points and winning the game. With Speed Scrabble, you do not use the Scrabble game board.
Every player has the same objective: Use all their letter tiles to spell and find words connected together in a grid. The words can be any combination of legal words from the Scrabble dictionary. You can rearrange your tiles and scramble letters to make new words whenever you wish, just like in Bananagrams. Players need to think fast to be the first to use all their tiles and score the most points.
Step-by-Step Speed Scrabble Instructions
Speed Scrabble instructions are easy to understand and follow. This game is for two to five players.
Place all 100 letter tiles from a regular Scrabble board game in the center of the play area. Make sure that all of the tiles are facedown.
Everyone draws a specific number of tiles depending on the number of players. If there are three or four players, draw five tiles each. If there are two or five players, draw six tiles each.
One player signals for everyone to begin. All players then flip their tiles over and begin forming their individual word grids.
The first player to use all of their letters immediately shouts, “Go.” Every player then draws an additional tile from the center pile.
Players add that tile to their existing words or rearrange their tiles to create new words, trying to use every tile they have.
Repeat steps four and five until there are no more tiles in the center pile.
The game ends once one of the players uses all of their tiles.
Scoring and Declaring a Winner
After someone manages to use all their tiles, players then add up their scores.
Each player adds up the total number of points on their letter tiles. They are counted for each word, so if you use one tile for multiple words, you count that tile’s score multiple times.
After adding up their scores, players then add up the points from any unused tiles. Each player must subtract the score for their unused tiles from the score they earned for their played words.
The player with the highest score after subtracting unused tiles wins the game.
Playing Online Speed Scrabble
If you were wondering, no, online Speed Scrabble is not available on a dedicated website or mobile app. Your best option for playing Speed Scrabble online with friends is through a video call.
As with online Bananagrams, you can play Speed Scrabble with modified rules over a Zoom call. There are no standard rules in place. This means that you and everyone else need to agree upon certain details before playing.
The most important rule to decide is how many letter tiles each player adds to their piles. Each player must own their own copy of Scrabble to play via a video call. You can play with all of the tiles, but doing so will make the game last much longer, since players will have 100 tiles each. That’s not very speedy.
Try Another Fun Scrabble Variant
Speed Scrabble is not as complex as the regular game, but it does offer a faster dynamic. Perhaps more complexity is something you want. If that’s the case, you would probably enjoy Clabbers. Clabbers is a Scrabble variant and essentially the game’s “hard mode.” Anyone who loves solving anagrams and facing a challenge could even like Clabbers more than the original game.
Zac Pricener has been a content creator for the past eight years. He’s a bit of an all-around nerd, and he has a bad habit of working movie and TV show references into conversations whenever possible.
