We've just rolled out a few changes to the website:
- Smaller boards. You can now change the size of the board using the Game Design tab. All sizes between 3x3 and 15x15 are supported. Take a look at My Designs to get started creating your own design using a custom sized board.
- Bingos for using any number of tiles. Previously, it was only possible to set bingos for using 7 or 8 tiles. You can now set a bingo points bonus for using any number of tiles.
- Sort by tiles used. In addition to the Score and Value options, you can now sort moves by the number of tiles used. This can be useful towards the end of a game where you are already in the lead and are trying to find a way to use all your tiles and finish the game.
- Words With Friends Fast Play and Word Chums. We've added support for Words With Friends Fast Play and Word Chums. You can select these games using the Design option located above the board. For Words With Friends Fast Play, we'd recommend also selecting the ENABLE dictionary. For Word Chums, you'll want to select ENABLE2K.
You may notice that the name of the Angry Words design option has been changed to Aworded (since the game was renamed). The Droid Words and WordWise game apps are no longer available, so we've also removed these design options.
A 162-page ebook on how to play Scrabble, written by 12 competitors from past World Scrabble Championships, is available now for free! "The Scrabble Player's Handbook" covers every aspect of the game's strategy, from dedicated word learning to the tactics used by the game's most dedicated tournament players. The book is being distributed for free as part of an effort to encourage people to play Scrabble face-to-face as a competitive activity, following on from the recent resurgence in popularity for the 65-year old board game classic as one of the most popular games played online by the younger generation.
The editor of The Scrabble Player's Handbook, Stewart Holden, said, "Tens of millions of people around the world are playing Scrabble and other word games on their smartphones and on Facebook every day. We're finding that with events like the UK Open Championships taking place in Coventry this week and offering prizemoney of over £10,000, people are pouring into clubs and tournaments like never before looking to pit their wits against others across the board. The Scrabble Player's Handbook is written by a dozen players from around the world who have all represented their country at the biennial World Scrabble Championships. It teaches everyone from beginner level upwards how to maximise their scoring potential on every turn and how to turn an online distraction into a serious competitive mind sport. The popularity of the book has shown there is a huge public appetite for Scrabble as more than a game to play with granny at Christmas. It's much more fun than that!"
The Scrabble Player's Handbook uses Scrabulizer software throughout and can be downloaded for free at http://www.scrabbleplayershandbook.com
A new update to the Scrabulizer app for iOS has been approved by Apple and is now available in the app store. Amongst other changes, this version adds iPhone 5 support, but most noticeably, the app has been renamed Lexalizer.
This change has come at the request of Hasbro Inc, who have also requested that we remove the TWL and OSPD dictionaries. We fortunately have plenty of other, more complete dictionaries for you to choose from, so you shouldn't notice much of a change.
We have received a lot of interest in Scrabulizer's potential to analyse other word games such as hangman, specifically Zynga's popular derivation of Hangman called
Hanging With Friends.
Scrabulizer can now help you solve and select words for Hangman and Hanging With Friends.
Use our
Hangman Solver to find the missing letters. Enter the pattern, and what letters you have already tried and Scrabulizer will report on the probability of each remaining letter and possible words.
Use our
Hangman Word Selector to choose words for your opponent to solve. Enter the letters you have available to make a word out of, and Scrabulizer will tell you all the possible words, and how difficult they are to guess.
Hangman involves revealing a hidden word by guessing its letters in as few attempts as possible. The usual approach is to start by guessing the vowels, they're pretty common after all. If you can know all the possible remaining words, and therefore all the remaining letters, it is possible to cheat the system by using the most likely letters first and solving the word quickly. Right? - Well, usually yes.
This is where strategy comes in. When choosing a word for your opponent to reveal, you want to pick a word that is going to take them many failed attempts. This means choosing obscure words with statistically unlikely letters. Suddenly the better strategy for picking letters is to pick the
least common letters.
Eventually, as players gauge the strategy of their opponent, they adjust their own selection criteria until neither opponent has an advantage. So use these tools wisely and you might just cheat the system.
Zynga have released a new Words With Friends app update for the iPhone, which as many of you have been letting us know, is not recognized by the Scrabulizer app.
We created a fix (version 2.0.7) as soon as we became aware of the problem, which was released to Apple on the 15th. Apple have to review all changes before they are made publicly available. This usually takes up to 10 days but we have requested it be expedited.
We apologise for the inconvenience and wish to thank every one who has submitted images of the new designs. These have helped us greatly in re-training the Scrabulizer image interpreters.
In the mean time, you can of course still use the manual game entry method of tapping on the board/rack, and using the keyboard to enter the tiles.
Update (19 July): Apple have now approved the new version containing the fix. Version 2.0.7 is now available as a free update in the App Store.
A new fresher looking site design was launched this morning. We hope you all like the new appearance. It may seem like some of the buttons are missing, such as "Clear Rack" and "Clear Move", but don't worry, they've just been integrated differently:
The solutions list now acts like a toggle switch. You can click on a move to show it (it will appear light green) and click it again to remove it.
A clear rack button will now appear to the right-hand side of the rack, but only if there are tiles to clear.
The clear board button is now at the top right-hand corner of the board.
The "Game Design" button, and the "Show tiles left in bag" link have gone, but we've added them to their own tabs above the solutions list.
We've just added support for three new games and one dictionary to the site. You can now use Scrabulizer for your DroidWords (Android), Wordsmith (Android) and WordWise (iPhone and Android) games. Wordsmith uses "Yet Another Word List" (YAWL) for its dictionary, so we've added that too.
To use one of these new games (or any of the other existing designs), just select it, along with the dictionary, using the options above the Scrabulizer board. You can also set your default game design and dictionary by editing your profile.
We'll be releasing an update to our iPhone app soon to add support for the new games and dictionary. If there are any other games or dictionaries you'd like to see added please get in touch.
Many of you have been asking, so we've now added support for Wordfeud to the site. This means that you can now use Scrabulizer to find the best scoring moves for your Wordfeud games without having to customize the board and rules yourself.
To solve (or cheat at!) a Wordfeud game, just select the Wordfeud option from the drop-down list of designs above the board and then pick TWL or SOWPODS as the dictionary (only English Wordfeud games are supported at present - use TWL for American English and SOWPODS for international English). If you would like to make Wordfeud your default design, you can do so by editing your profile.
Scrabulizer now supports six different games: Lexulous, Literati, Wordfeud, Words with Friends, Wordscraper as well as regular Scrabble. Please do get in touch if you would like to see any more added. If there is a game that we don't yet support, or you just want to change the rules, you can also pick the Custom design option.
Finally, we would just like to thank Sassmo and Nate who helped gather all the information we needed to define the Wordfeud rules.
We are pleased to announce the release of our new Scrabulizer Importer extension for Google Chrome. We've had a Firefox extension available for some time that lets you import your Lexulous and Wordscraper games, saving you the pain of having to enter games yourself. If you use Google Chrome you can now import your games too.
You can install the extension by visiting our Google Chrome download page and following the easy instructions. Once installed, a Scrabulizer icon will appear in the Chrome address bar when you are playing Lexulous and Wordscraper games on Facebook and Lexulous.com email games. Click on the icon to import the game into Scrabulizer.
If you don't already have Chrome installed, you can download it for free from Google.
Version 2.0.0 of the iPhone application is now available on the App Store, and as a free update to those who have already purchased it.
This latest version introduces the much awaited image recognition, to let you load a game straight from an image, in particular screenshots taken of another application.
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