Playing physical Scrabble remotely is hard because Scrabble is not a game of perfect information. This means each player in a game of Scrabble knows different things about the state of the game.
Chess has perfect information so it's easy to synchronize your board with a far-off friend's. People have been doing so using the postal service since the 1800s and calling it "correspondence chess".
With Scrabble, players don't know the tiles in their opponent's hands, and none of the players knows the contents of the tile bag. To play Scrabble remotely on two physical boards, we need a tool to keep track of a shared tile bag that both players can draw from. Scrabblebag.org does exactly this!
Getting started
Start a new game with 2–4 players. Copy your game's link and share it with your friends. Scrabblebag shows everyone the same thing: A page with each player's name and the shared tile bag in the middle. Click on a player's name to view their hand.
Trust
Just like during an in-person Scrabble game, with Scrabblebag it's the responsibility of the players not to peek at each other's hands or look into the bag. This means that you don't need to log in or create an account to use Scrabblebag.
How to play
Draw tiles, then select tiles from your hand to play them or put them back in the bag. You can change your name to remember whose hand belongs to who. Each game has a 9-letter game ID shown in the page's URL. With this code you can leave the page and return to the same game later. Games are saved until they have no activity for 30 days.
Using with your physical rack and board
Part of the joy of Scrabble is that tactile feel of the physical board and rack. We find that using Scrabble's physical tiles on a rack helped us experiment with words. Here's how to use Scrabblebag and your physical Scrabble in harmony:
- Playing a word: I play onto my physical board from my tile rack. Then I then select and play those tiles on the site as well.
- An opponent plays a word: It's my job to replicate their play on my physical board by picking the right tiles from the bag.
- Drawing: I click draw on the site and then pick out the corresponding physical tiles to add to my physical rack.
Scrabblebag.org (scrabblepouch.com) was built by Will Harris-Braun with help from Poppy Northing and Eric Harris-Braun. Problems or questions? Get in touch.
Disclaimer: SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. Scrabblebag.org is not affiliated with SCRABBLE®, Mattel Inc, or Hasbro Inc.