Duplicate Scrabble

Duplicate Scrabble is popular in France but has never taken off in the US.

Way back in the 70s Hasbro or whoever put out a Duplicate Scrabble game, but it was a chintzy thing. You had a deck of cards with letters on them, you'd shuffle it and put it in a tray that you could slide back and forth and the cards would drop out, and those were the letters everyone chose.

I'm doing a different version, where one person chooses letters out of a bag, and all other players choose their letters from a large tray in which all 100 tiles are face up so folks can see what letters to draw.

Duplicate Scrabble takes luck completely out of the equation - each player, from one to as many as want to play - have to play with the same 7 letters each time - plus whatever is on the board.

I'll be playing it with my Scrabble club for the first time on Thursday, and will report back with how it goes.