Take a look at the club roster for the club director’sĬontact information and give him/her a call or send an email.Īlmost all clubs are extremely welcoming to newcomers, and The chances are good that you live near a NASPA club.

Many players try their hand at competitive play at a NASPA club before taking on a tournament. A better place to start is our Newcomer’s Handout, and the most important rule to remember is to always ask the director if you’re not sure what to do. They can be intimidating, especially during your first game, when you’re trying to remember the sequence of actions needed to correctly end a turn (place word, announce score, record any blank designations, start opponent’s timer, record your cumulative score, draw replacement tiles, record anything else you want). Etiquette Our official rules are fairly long, and are the result of decades of experience in trying to come up with the fairest way for players to compete. If you go overtime, you lose penalty points but do not immediately forfeit the game as in chess. A game is typically 12–15 plays each, so you could safely spend a minute or two on each play, or spend ten minutes on one and then a minute on the rest. To keep everyone to a schedule, club and tournament directors require the use of timers, typically limiting each player’s total thinking time to 25 minutes per game. There are some game positions that require very little thought, but others that experts can debate for days. Timed Games Some people are naturally fast players, most people are a little deliberative, and a few people are extremely slow. On first glance, most people think it has either too many or too few words, but it's our best compromise against the chaos that would ensue if every club used its own dictionary. The NWL was compiled from several college-level dictionaries, and is therefore more inclusive than any one of the source works while being more restrictive than a large unabridged dictionary. NASPA Word List (NWL) Many websites use this lexicon too, but you may be used to using either the slightly abridged Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary or a non-Scrabble dictionary. When more players are involved in a casual game, there is an advantage to having your turn after a weaker player. More to it, or maybe you hear about a local club or tournament.Ī web search brings you to our website, so now what? Here are the things that casual players first notice about competitive play.Ĭompetitive play One-on-one play All competitive play consists of two-player games. Pretty good at the game and get to wondering if there’s Or spend a few hours a day playing online. Maybe you get together for a regular game with some friends, So you’ve been a Scrabble player for fun for a while. Scrabble tournaments, but let’s see if we can What is competitive Scrabble play and what draws people to it?Ībout his personal experience entering the world of

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