Excuse the intentional misspelling to avoid copyright searches.

I enjoy a good game of Scrabble, which is a nice combination of skill and luck.  It’s also a fundamentally “nice” game in that everyone plays until the end.  You don’t eliminate players from the game, and the game does not encourage unpleasant behaviour, unlike games such as Monopoly.

But there are three problems with holding a game of Scrabble: (1) finding players, (2) travelling with the game is difficult, and (3) lost pieces can’t be replaced.  There’s not much one can do about the first except meet new people, but something can be done about the game.  Read on….

A standard Scrabble board is 15×15 squares, or 225 spaces.  With 100 pieces, that’s 0.444… pieces per square.  To make the game more portable, I created a new 11×11 board with 121 squares.  This new board is 53.777…% of the original size, so it gets 54 pieces.  There are 60 bonus squares on a 15×15 board, or 26.666…% (not counting the centre).  A reduced Scrabble board has 44 bonus squares, or 36.363636…%.

You can print the image below or create your own within a spreadsheet.  Make the cells 2cm x 2cm with borders, and use colours or four different grey scale backgrounds (e.g. two solid, two with pinstripes).  I split a spreadsheet into two parts (six and five columns) and printed them on two pieces of sticking A4 size paper (or 8.5″x11″).  Ten carefully placed and aligned the pieces on thick hard card (2mm or 3mm works best).

A standard Scrabble set has 100 pieces in this distribution:

• 2 blank tiles (scoring 0 points)
• 1 point: E ×12, A ×9, I ×9, O ×8, N ×6, R ×6, T ×6, L ×4, S ×4, U ×4
• 2 points: D ×4, G ×3
• 3 points: B ×2, C ×2, M ×2, P ×2
• 4 points: F ×2, H ×2, V ×2, W ×2, Y ×2
• 5 points: K ×1
• 8 points: J ×1, X ×1
• 10 points: Q ×1, Z ×1

Reduced Scrabble has 54 pieces in this distribution:

• 2 blank tiles (scoring 0 points)
• 1 point: E ×7, A ×5, I ×5, O ×4, N ×3, R ×3, T ×3, L ×2, S ×2, U ×2
• 2 points: D ×2, G ×2
• 3 points: B ×1, C ×1, M ×1, P ×1
• 4 points: F ×1, H ×1, V ×1, W ×1, Y ×1
• 5 points: K ×1
• 8 points: X ×1
• 10 points: Q or Z ×1

I intentionally excluded J and give players the choice of Q or Z.  Other more usable letters could be substituted by player preference (e.g. a second H instead of K) or if pieces are missing.

Game play:

• Each player takes five pieces per turn.  (In original and reduced, players only need one piece to reach two Triple Word squares.)
• A player using all five tiles in one turn receives a 20 point bonus.  (Using all five is far easier than using seven.)
• All other standard Scrabble scoring rules apply.

If anyone has suggestions or amendments, let me know.