Matthew BaileyIf you had told me a “Scrabble” variant would become possibly one of the most controversial games in recent years a few months ago I would have laughed out loud but “Scrabble Together” has caused widespread uproar of “wokeness” and “dumbing down” of Scrabble in mainstream media. Interestingly this variant has been available since the end of last year but until The Guardian wrote its article and everyone else jumped on board with an “anti-woke” narrative it has gone largely unnoticed. I thought rather than just reading a headline I would actually buy the game, play it and give an actual review (which is more than 99.9% of the media seems to have done).
So that’s how Jack(.8.) and I ended up playing “Scrabble Together”
So the game in question isn’t actually a stand-alone game but instead an alternate side to the regular Scrabble board of which is completely available and usual in this game.
“Scrabble Together” is a cooperative game where you start by drawing 20 “goal” cards from the deck of available goal cards. It recommends you choose the starred cards for your first game but as this had a reputation of being ”super easy” we thought we would just go all in and choose random cards (blissfully unaware that in out first game at least we were about to get punished).
You win the game by playing 20 successful turns and collecting 20 cards. If at any point you cannot play a turn legally the game is over and you lose.
These goal cards vary from simple ones such as “play a word worth 5 or more points,” to restrictive such as “play a word with exactly 5 letters” to difficult such as “play a word with on a corner square with at least one 3 value letter.”
3 of these goal cards are available at any one time and on EVERY turn you have to fulfil one of these goals meaning as you play you need to constantly be thinking ahead so that you don’t use up letters you will likely need on a later turn.
If you run into problems there are 6 helper cards that can be used once each game. These include:
Refresh Goals
Trade Tiles with another player
Make a Blank
Exchange your tiles
Take an extra tile
Complete any goal
While these are helpful its worth noting things like exchanging your tiles, something that is common in Scrabble, can only be used once by one player. Meaning that very quickly you end up stuck with “vowel soup” in your hand.
We played the game 3 times, lost twice and won once. Contrary to what the mainstream media would like to have you believe while this is a variant of Scrabble this is most definitely not an easy game to win. Ending up unable to complete any of the 3 goals and out of helper cards can happen quickly and requires careful planning and teamwork (you aren’t allowed to discuss what letters you have).
Overall this is a game that plays completely differently from Scrabble and actually is really enjoyable (I think actually I like it more than Scrabble). The skills needed are different but it is by no means “woke” or “dumbed down” as has been widely reported and I suspect that the reporter who originally wrote the Guardian article was struggling over the concept of a cooperative board game.
Components are fine although the board itself is a little bit on the cheap side.
I actually totally recommend “Scrabble Together” even if you already own a copy of Scrabble as a game in its own right. Its one of the more interesting word games I have played and totally doesn’t deserve any negative press.
