Handmark is following up the success of their Monopoly game for the Pocket PC by developing another popular board game, Scrabble, for the Pocket PC. Scrabble, widely considered the most popular word game in the world comes in many forms. Will Handmark's Scrabble for the Pocket PC live up to expectations? Read on to find out.
Game Play
Before starting a game of Scrabble you'll need to decide what type of opponent(s) you would like to compete against. Handmark has allowed for a variety of different options when picking opponents. You can play against 1-3 human opponents (on a single device or on multiple devices via IR) or computer opponents. The computer opponents vary in difficult from easy to hard. The AI in the game seems to be pretty true to the level. I was able to defeat the easy opponents nearly every time that I played, but the medium opponents beat me just about every time that I played. The hard opponents seem like people who would EASILY score an 800 on the verbal part of the SAT. They will use words that are usually reserved only for spelling bees. The hard opponents should be able to challenge even the best Scrabble experts.
Don't think that the only difference between the easy, medium, and hard opponents is in the dictionary that is available to them. The higher level opponents are able to make better use of their tiles to better take advantage of the special squares on the board. Combine this added logic to the seemingly broader vocabulary and you can see that the hard opponents are really difficult to defeat.
Once you have chosen your opponents you'll be taken to the familiar Scrabble game board and the first player will be able to see his assortment of seven letter tiles. These are the tiles that will be used by each player to create his/her words. As each player takes his turn he/she has several options. He can create a word using his tiles, he may exchange one or more of his tiles (assuming that there are enough tiles remaining to exchange), or he can pass his turn. For human opponents there is the option of having moves suggested by the computer. In order for this option to be available during game play it must be activated during the initial game set-up.
Once a word has been placed on the board the computer will verify that the word is in the Official Scrabble dictionary. If the word is valid the computer will tally up the score (including any special squares) and play will progress to the next player. If the word is not found an error screen will come up with the word(s) that have been played. There is a column to indicate which word(s) are invalid. You will then have the option of accepting these word(s) or replaying the turn. If you are a hard core Scrabble player this is nice because it will save you the time of manually looking up words to verify their authenticity.
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