Customer Reviews

The Big Book of Scrabblegrams (Scrabble Brand Grams)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A ScrabbleGram is a simple word puzzle which gives you a "rack" of seven letters. Your job? To find the longest word playable on the rack. Often the best words are 7-letter words, but sometimes the longest ones are only 5 or 6 letters long.

These puzzles are a great way to practice your Scrabble rack strategy and "anagramming". They're also a really nice twist on puzzles (fans of Crosswords, Sudoku and especially Jumble will definitely enjoy these as a nice change). I found that doing a couple of the puzzles before playing a Scrabble game was surprisingly helpful, it made for a great warmup.

I've found most travel editions of Scrabble to be somewhat unwieldy, they seldom lie flat and the little letters often get lost, so I've long since given up on travel Scrabble, but these puzzles are a great way for me to enjoy my favorite game even when I can't play a full-length version of it. Wonderful! I'm really hoping these catch on and a whole line of the books become available, because I'm nearly done with mine and I'll want more soon!

Good practice. Use post-its & you can use it over & over.

Good book. Puzzles are enjoyable and doable. If you can't scrounge a scrabble partner this will get you a scrabble fix.

This book contains many more Scrabblegrams and for anyone who enjoys this type of Scrabble play the games are excellent. I only hope that they put out a book called "Another Big Book of Scrabblegrams"!

I enjoy playing Scrabble, but it's hard to find someone to play with. This book is a good alternative to playing a full game with a friend. It gives you several racks of letters and you try to make the highest scoring word possible. It's a good challenge and great for road trips.

The book is okay. Could use some variety in the puzzles. Also, the answer pages contain more than one consecutive puzzle answer so it is easy to mistakenly see an answer for a later puzzle. Other puzzle books scramble the answers non-consecutively to prevent this problem.

I don't really care for this book. It would have been better if they had seven letter word only games and maybe games to quiz you on two and three letter words....and there isn't much to this book either...so it could have been bigger. Being called a big book is a big stretch.

Although the product description is accurate, the title Scrabblegrams is very misleading. The book contains simply crossword puzzles that use the Scrabble dictionary as the word source. Its only assist to a Scrabble player is as a vocabulary developer. "The Official Scrabble Puzzle Book" by Joe Edley is the ideal book for anyone seeking to develop their skill as a player while developing vocabulary.

A Scrabblegram is a collection of four (or sometimes five) "racks" of seven letters. Your job is to form the highest-scoring word you can from each rack. Scrabblegrams are featured in some newspapers; this book collects nearly 150 Scrabblegrams into a single volume.

The main value of these exercises for a serious Scrabble player is the practice they provide in finding bingos. Other aspects of the game are not addressed because no board configuration is provided along with the racks. You are not explicitly told how many of the four racks are bingos; however, at the bottom of each Scrabblegram there is a "par score." The number of bingos is almost always equal to the par score divided by 50 (rounded off). Note that the par score for the Scrabblegram on page 131 is incorrectly given as 150-160 (it should be 200-210; the correct figure is given on the answer page).

Almost all the words in the book are fairly common words. The serious Scrabble player should note that, despite what it says at the front of the book, not all the words in the book are in OSPD3. Specifically, the answers provided for p.72 rack 4, p.90 rack 4, p.96 racks 1 and 4, p.108 rack 1, p.114 rack 1, p.140 rack 2, p.144 rack 3, and p.151 rack 1 are not in OSPD3. Also, there is at least one instance of a sub-optimal answer (p.70 rack 3). Sometimes there is an alternate answer that scores just as high as the provided answer (e.g., p.142 rack 4). There may be other examples; I did not check the puzzles with a computer.

Overall this is a nice collection of puzzles that Scrabble fans should enjoy.