Scrabble Rules Primer

So you want to play the classic game of Scrabble? Before you get started, you'll need a game board, 100 letter tiles in a bag, tile racks, a dictionary and an introduction to Scrabble rules.

Playing the Game
First things first. Each player draws a letter from the bag to see who gets to make the first move. A blank tile or, alternately, the letter closest to "A" gets the honor. Next, everyone takes seven tiles from the bag and places them on his or her rack.

When you make your first word, consider this: Any word in the dictionary is fair game except for abbreviations, prefixes, suffixes or words that are always capitalized, have an apostrophe or are hyphenated.

If you think an opponent misspelled, made up or used an unacceptable word you can challenge. If the dictionary confirms your suspicions, you opponent player loses a turn.

Your word should read down or across, not diagonal. Once you've placed your word, add up your score and reach into the letter bag to replace the tiles you used.

Play continues around the circle to the left. As you place letters on the board, make sure any letters in adjacent rows complete words, too. Everything on the board has to make sense! That said, you can place words parallel to a word on the board, at right angles to a word on the board or you can add letters on to a previously played word.

If you get stumped, you can use your turn to replace all or a few of your tiles. Remember that blank tiles can represent whichever letter you wish, but you must state your desire and stick to it for the duration of play. Once the letter bag is empty and one player runs out of tiles (or no more plays are possible), the game is over.

Scoring
Keep a running tally of scores throughout the game. After each play, add up the numbers on the tiles used in the word, taking care to multiply according to any special colored squares on the board (double letter score, triple word score, etc.). If your word runs adjacent to another word, any extra words created in the process are scored separately, meaning that some tiles may be counted twice.

One high scoring move is a Bingo: Play all seven tiles on one turn to get an extra 50 points added on to that word's score.

After the game has ended, add up each person's unplayed letters and subtract it from his or her final score. However, if one player ended tile-free, that player gets to add the sum of his opponent's unplayed letters to his final score. The player with the highest score wins. If there's a tie, count only the final score before unplayed letters were added or subtracted.

The rules are the same whether you are playing Scrabble on a board or a Scrabble computer game.