My View: It's Brilliant
Brother Tad's bright idea to equalize draws in a 2-player game: use two draw bags, and eight additional tiles from a second Scrabble game.
Players draw from their own bag; and in their bag are the same tiles set as in their opponent's bag.
The eight additional tiles are: one each from the eight letters that have an odd count: "z", "q", "x", obviously, and five others (see chart on your Scrabble board).
This variant, we discovered, tackles two problems with Scrabble:
* no player can complain that they drew inferior, low-point tiles; likewise, 's' tiles and 'blanks' (frankly, two blanks drawn by a single player during a given game is very hard to beat).
* this variant rewards longer words, as a player can be 'ahead', but have tiles left in their bag when another player uses her last--so, much more interesting, as this negates the obsession with the 'perfect' play that only a Scrabble geek can fathom.
If you try it, you'll have to separate your 100 + 8 tiles into two stacks of equal numbers of 'a's, 'b's, etc., before the game can begin. But, it's worth it!
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