Bookraft

If you are like me and hate to lose at Scrabble, let me recommend the following as a tool that does for the linguist centers of the brain the same that crunches do for your abdomen - exercise and tune them up.

Here are 5 word puzzle solving exercises that get users used to the idea of finding words in a scrambled rack of letters and in a hurry. The two best games are Lightning and Timed word solving. In each you are running against atime limit. In the Timed game you are given a rack of 5 to 9 characters and you have to unscramble the longest posible word in less than 2 minutes to go to the next round. However, you score more points by solving someof the shorter word that can be found from the rack of letters. You get a bonus if you solve all the words possible from the rack of letters [well to be strictly honest all the words Timed allows for - for 5 and 6 letter words I often find more words then Text Twist allows for. But all in all this is really a superb Scrabble exercise.

Lightning is even more perverse - you are given 5 racks of letters to solve successively again running against the clock. About half the time when the words are 6 letters or less you can see the solution right away; but if you cant after 10 seconds Text Twist starts to give you hints - the frst letter, then the second etc. But having to wait drains the amount of time you have to solve the 5 racks and go onto to the next round. As you go to the next round the words get longer: 8,9 and 10 letters as you get to round 10 or more[very hard to do]. Lightning is just a great Scrabble exercise.

In comparison Crossword has no time limit but has the perverse trick that in a slot self word can be fit from the rack of letters provided. But you may put in a word that does not allow a solution later in the crossword. So you have to think ahead, It is also good practice using overlapping words in Scrabble.

Word of the Day and Untimed are just variations on the Timed puzzle. Word of the Day is timed but does not have any new level while Untimed does have levels but no time limit to solve all the words at each level. I find it useful to develop a strategy for finding all the words from the rack.

You can find TextTwist at Yahoo Games and can run it for free for 30 minutes. After that its $29.95US for some of the best Scrabble exercises I have been able to find to date. Warning - wordsmiths this games are highly addictive. And think, next time I will show you another Web Word Game that is highly addictive and free of charge.