Mattel Scrabble Original > Reviews (13)

As a youngster one game that we played a lot, especially when away on a holiday and it was raining, was the Mattel game, Scrabble. There have been many versions of this game over the years, but the original is still the best. I purchased this game from amazon for £18.99.

Scrabble is a game of words and the better your knowledge of words are, the easier you will find the game. As a young child, it helps to improve your use of the English language and you get to learn new and obscure words.

This game is easy to play with 2-4 players required. The game comes with the following pieces, a Scrabble board, 100 Scrabble letters, 4 tile holders for to place your letters and a bag. You need to mix up the letters and place I them in the bag. Each player must pull out 7 letters from the bag and when it is their turn, they must place the letters on to the board, attempting to score as many points as possible. The board is a square grid measuring fifteen by fifteen spaces with many different tiles which can be either normal tiles, or bonus tiles such as double letter score, treble letter score, double word score, or treble word score. Each of the letters has different points associated with them as below,

0 points - blank tile
1 point - A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T and U.
2 points - D and G.
3 points - B, C, M and P.
4 points - F, H, V, W and Y.
5 points - K
8 points - J and X
10 points - Q and Z

Each player has a turn to make a word from their 7 letters and they can increase the word total by placing the letters on the bonus point tiles. If you use all of your letters, you earn a bonus score of 50 points in addition to the word score. The winner is the player with the highest score. Words must be in the English dictionary and not contain hyphens.

Scrabble can be competitive with each player attempting to obtain the highest score possible. It also means that it can become very tactical with players trying to avoid giving other players opportunities to benefit from their words or letters.

This is an enjoyable game which helps to educate children and improve their knowledge of words as well as their spelling. I think Scrabble is suitable for the whole family.