What is Woadwage?

It's the latest craze in the world of Scrabble^®

Woadwage is a Scrabble variant played on the Super Scrabble board which contains six more rows and columns than the standard Scrabble board, and has Quadruple-Letter and Quadruple-Word squares.

It uses the 200-tile set that comes with Super Scrabble (which is not the standard 100 letters doubled - the distribution is more fine-tuned).

Two to four players can play.

The object of the game is to make a compound play consisting of two acceptable OWL2* words combined. The resulting play does not have to make a real word in and of itself, such as ZIPFRAIL (made up of ZIP and FRAIL), but it could -- for example FORGETS would be an acceptable play as it's a combination of FOR and GETS, both of which are legal words in regular scrabble. You still get the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles in one play.

Unless you get a rack of all vowels or consonants, it's not uncommon for most of the plays to be bingos until the board starts to fill up. 2- or 3-letter hooks or overlaps are not allowed, nor are back-S hooks. You can only play through an existing word, not hook onto it. The shortest possible play is four letters, i.e. a compound of two 2-letter words such as BYME.

It is possible to simultaneously front- and back-extend an existing play to make two new words. For example, OUTCRY is on the board and you put ST in front of it and ING in back of it to make STOUTCRYING. Even though you're making what appear to be "nonsense" word plays, Woadwage still requires knowledge of acceptable OWL2 words, and even rewards those with better knowledge of short words as it just challenges your knowledge in a different way.

Click on a picture below to view sample gameboards:

Go to the Woadwage page at the Syosset Scrabble Club