Previous Next

A classic conversion of the board game or just a turkey? Paula Richards thinks it must be Christmas

Board game conversions onto your ST might seem a little silly, however well they're done - and the idea of converting Scrabble is no exception. Everybody knows how to play the game, but just in case you've had your head stuck in the sand since you were born, it's just a matter of creating words from the seven letters you've picked randomly from the pool, then interlocking them with other words that are already on the board. The letters score differently, depending how frequently they're used in words and you can increase your score by a bit of tactical positioning on double and triple word scores. The ST version isn't so different, except that you have a bit more control over the level of competition you undertake.

You can choose from Level A - the easiest - to Level L which is virtually impossible. You don't have to work through the levels before you progress, so if you fancy feeling incredibly smug, just pick Level A, with its vocabulary of 2,400 short, very common words where scores are usually less than eight points. On the other hand, if you're in the mood for a bit of masochistic depression, pit yourself against Level L which uses 134,900 words including all words of nine letters or less, strategy (which presumably means peeking to see what your letters are and trying to prevent you from putting down your prize words) and it also tries all letters for blanks.

There's also a Help option if you play in the Practice - as opposed to "Competition" mode, which consists of telling you how many other words you could have chosen which would have given you a higher score. Investigate this a little further, however, and you find that (a) it's not actually surprising you didn't think of a particular word because it's not in your vocabularly - like "EE", for example; (b) it wouldn't interlock with all the other words on the board, giving you some very weird combinations that couldn't possibly be described as words and (c) there aren't actually that many more words - just different positions you could have put them in.

Scrabble usually includes plenty of healthy bickering about what words are real or not and a dictionary is an essential part of the gameplay, but the problem with the ST version is that you can't argue with it - and this wouldn't be so bad if it didn't permit so many ludicrous words for itself, but you're allowed to get away with very little - and then you lose your turn if it's not in the dictionary!

If you get enough of your ST's overbearing attitude, you can always try and get some of your friends involved - you can have up to four players taking part and you can alter the length of time from the standard 25 minutes to play to take into account their quick-thinking ability.

Graphically, the game hasn't much going for it - but then what can you do with a Scrabble board and a few tiles? Sonically, there are a few sort of sound effects but they don't exactly add a great deal to the atmosphere - they certainly don't make up for the despairing sighs and cries of "that's not far" you'd get if you were playing the real thing.

The main problem lies with the fact that this has some extremely bizarre words in it - words you would never let a human opponent get away with. 25 minutes isn't actually that long to play a decent game of Scrabble, although if you used all the Help and Hint options you might get to the end a bit faster, but that would ruin the fun of the game. Rather than adding anything to the board game - and that's despite having the ability to print out your score sheets - this ST conversion takes away most of the fun. There seems little point in bothering with it.

1. Plenty of difficulty levels, a challenge.

1. Spelling mistakes and non-existent words are included.