Duplicate Scrabble

At the end of the allotted time, the players must hold up their slips to be collected by a runner.

Duplicate Scrabble is a variant of Scrabble where all the players are faced with the same board and letters at the same time and must play the highest scoring word they can find. Although duplicate is rarely played at competition level in the United States,[citation needed] it is the most popular form of the game in Europe, most notably in France[citation needed], Romania[1] and the Netherlands,[2] and is also played in Canada. The largest European Scrabble festivals can attract over 2000 people and some individual tournaments can count over 1000 participants per game. Although not popular for competitions in the US, the computer game Scrabble 2005 contains a duplicate version allowing up to 16 players to play on the same board at once.[3] It was also used on the UK TV game show TV Scrabble as one of the rounds.[4]

  1. ^ (in Romanian) Results of "simultaneous" duplicate games in Romanian.
  2. ^ (in Dutch) Site dedicated to duplicate Scrabble in Dutch Archived 2010-02-08 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ (in English) Scrabble 2005 Archived 2008-05-31 at the Wayback Machine on WHSmith.co.uk
  4. ^ (in English) TV Scrabble on ukgameshows.com