I hardly ever play card games beyond Rummy & the infrequent Poker game. Nonetheless, 1 Saturday morning I found a discount promotion in a magazine which had a buy 1 get 1 free offer for card games. I chose "Monopoly Deal" & this game "Scrabble Slam".
As games go this one is really quite simple. A 4 letter word is presented on the table (GRAB, BUMP, FATE, etc) and the leftover cards are dealt to each player. Not all letters are present in the "deck" of 55 cards. There won't be any Q's or X's, however, there are a few Z's and several Blanks (which can be used just like in the Scrabble board game). Each card has 2 letters on it, one on the front and the other on the back, which enables the player a lot of flexibility to change words that are on the board.
Each player then plays in turn to lay down a single card anywhere on the 4 letter word. For instance, player 1 may spell GRIM and player two lays down a P to make it GRIP. Player 1 may respond with a T making it TRIP. The important part to remember is that players can place cards SIMULTANEOUSLY. So, there are no turns per se. As the game moves along it may become somewhat difficult to make words out and obviously that you will want to eliminate the harder letters as quickly as possible (Z, J, K, etc.) if that's all you've got left at the conclusion of the game you are going to maintain an enormous amount of hurt. The individual with the fewest cards at the conclusion of the game wins. If a person desires to up the difficulty a little simply up the amount of letters in the word. Just which makes it 5 letters long had a noticeable effect making it much more challenging.
I rate the game highly. It's a great game for family night.
Advantages:
-Extremely easy game to understand
-Your own children will have fun and learn words on the way. That can't be a bad thing now can it.
-At less than the cost of lunch this game is a great value.
-The game plays moves very fast, usually finishing in less than 30 minutes.
Downsides:
- If there are a lot of players some players may get more cards than others, and that makes it a little difficult to figure out who the winner is going to be.
-The Dealer will notice what cards everyone gets, but only a MENSA candidate with a photographic memory will remember who has what.
To learn more about scrabble slam, click here.
