Hasbro Family Game Night: Scrabble Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I love me some Scrabble. Thus, picking this up was a no-brainer -- especially with the XBLA deal of the week putting it down to $5. While it's a good alternative to the physical board game, it does have some big issues.
This is Scrabble, plain and simple. Make the highest point total word you can from the seven tiles in front of you -- building off existing words. It's an awesome game, but you don't always have someone to play with. In this respect, Scrabble on XBLA is great: You can do a single-player game, then compare your final score to the leaderboards. It's also online enabled, so you can go over Xbox Live and outspell friends and strangers. Nice, right?
Where it stutters is during same-screen multiplayer. There is no good way to hide your letters, so either you make everyone else turn away during your turn, your everyone sees everyone else's letters. This isn't so bad if you're playing casually, but more competitive games are all but ruined. This can't be helped much, but no real attempt was made to position the interface to make "hiding" your tiles easy.
A few minor gripes: If you try a word that the dictionary doesn't recognize, you automatically lose your turn. This should be changeable. Also, there's no interaction to picking tiles -- which would've been a nice kind of minigame. And finally, the music is unappealing, and doesn't fully mute even if you turn it off in the options and play a hard-drive stored song.
At $5, I feel I got my money's worth. But for $10, I may have been a little disappointed. My wife and I will basically play this co-op to get the highest score. It's a shame it fails at the main way people play the "real" Scrabble, though.


Click Here to see more reviews about: Hasbro Family Game Night: Scrabble

Click here for more information about Hasbro Family Game Night: Scrabble