Okay, its sort of a confusing concept, but let's take this step by step. Day by day. A fresh start over, a different--wait, wrong article.

Alright. In 1984, a game show version of Scrabble made its premiere on NBC daytime. Obviously, a TV show where people sat down and played crosswords for half an hour isn't that exciting. (Ty Treadway, please take reference.) So in order to make a more exciting TV show, a format was devised in which players took turns selecting letters that would eventually complete a one-word answer to a clue. The challenge is that some letters provided didn't actually go in the puzzle, so players hoped to avoid those letters and still be able to solve the word first.

Three years into the game show's successful run, Scrabble's board game publisher Selchow & Righter released a version that aligned with the TV show's rules and gameplay. The contents of the game are quite different. No cool sand timer, no velveeten or PVC bag, and thus, no letter tiles. In fact, there's not even the Scrabble board--at least in its usual form. More on that later.

Instead is a big plastic brick called the Console. Prominent in the Console is the famed 80s game invention, the Red Plastic Cloaking Device.

The beloved 80s board game cloaking device.

The game comes with a pad of 50 sheets of paper with that red cloaking type covering up the puzzles used in the games. Each sheet is a complete 'episode' of the game that is torn off the pad and then folded into fourths in order to fit in the Device's slot.

Like on the TV show, an image of the game board is used to play each word. The classic Scrabble board is shrunken down to a small, roughly 5" square sheet, on another pad. Instead of the cool electronic sound effects of a word being outlined on a computerized Scrabble board, you can awkwardly draw an outline and make the sound effects yourself. "Do-loo-loo-loo-loo-loo! Dun-nun-nun-nun-nun-nun-nun-nun..."

While I admit to drawing on the game board in the picture,
that is all I admit to doing.

The clues that appear in the Device are very specific. They tell you which letter in the first word will be placed in the pink star square, and each successive clue will tell you which letter in the word gets built off. This can get complicated and prone to drawing error.

When the clue is read out, a player selects two "tiles," represented in the Device just as numbers. The windows below the numbers are slid down half way to reveal the letters. Once a letter is selected, the window goes down all the way. Either it'll reveal the place in the word it goes in, or it'll reveal a Stopper, represented by a quaint little star.

Just like on TV, players guess letters until they hit a stopper, then play goes to the other. Guess the word, win the round. Each round is worth a certain number of points, a difference from the show.

The big difference comes during the Scrabble Sprint round. On TV, the first person to win three rounds goes to the Sprint, guessing five words in as fast a time as possible. In the home game, speed has little or nothing to do with it. A clue is given. Letters are revealed randomly, one at a time. The two players keep their hands over a gizmo called the Sprint Meter (TM), which is a simple lever device that will point an arrow in the direction of the person who buzzed in first. Guess the word, win the points.

After the three Sprint puzzles have been won, points from the whole game are tabulated, and who earned more wins.

It took nearly an hour to play the home version of the 30-minute game show, including the folding of the gamesheet, placing it in the Device, pulling said sheet out and refolding it to get to the next clue, drawing the clue spaces out on the gamepad, All in all, not a bad game, but not really fit for a manual setup. At the time, Selchow and Righter were owned by Coleco...so why did this not come out as a computer game?

Listen to the full master theme song of TV's "Scrabble" at our YouTube account, "cmonfwank" or below!

Chase, 11/10/08

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