Tips buyword

Know the rules

• You can hold up to eight tiles, not counting wilds.
• You can play at most one wild per word (not per round!)
• You can sell more than one word at a time.
• Therefore, you usually don't want to sell unless you have more than eight tiles. You can always sell the same word on the next round, but with more tiles, you may find that you have a better play!
• Do sell with fewer than eight tiles if your remaining balance is so low that you might not be able to afford more tiles.
• There is no penalty for playing an illegal word, so go ahead and try! You might see the failed word in your own game log, but other players will not.
• There is no penalty for having leftover letters at the end of the game.
• Sorry, no one-letter words.

Tips for making words

Try to find letter combinations that can extend your words. Adding -ING gives an extra four pips, which can add a huge amount to your score. Look for -S, -ED, -Y, and -LY.

Again, there's no penalty for guessing. You can sometimes get away with playing words that you never knew existed!

Managing your money

The guiding principle of the game is always buy low, sell high. The squaring of numbers is a powerful force; doubling the number of pips in a word quadruples the value. If you can buy several small batches of letters and sell them all as one word, you can wind up with a huge profit.

Often you'll get a draw that seems expensive, and wonder whether you should buy it or discard. Instead of thinking about buying groups of letters and selling words, think in terms of buying the pips on the tiles. If a group of letters costs $121, you're buying 11 pips at $11 apiece. In order to turn a profit, you have to sell them for greater than $11 each. Is that feasible? That's a judgment call based on the tiles you're holding, as well as your own vocabulary.

Sometimes you might not have an S, but you can play a wild as one. Is it worth it? That depends. Suppose your word contains x pips, scoring x². Adding one pip will increase your score by (2x + 1). So going from 4 to 5 is only worth an extra 9 points, but going from 12 to 13 gets you 25. Again, use your judgment to decide.

User interface

When there are not enough tiles left for the current roll or any further rolls, a warning appears at the top that it's the last round. Unfortunately, it's easy to miss. Too often, I've seen people pass without realizing that the game is ending and waste several tiles; I've done it myself a few times. This should be corrected, but turning on the option that shows the number of tiles remaining will help you remember when the game is ending.

No, there's no way to alphabetize or randomize the letters in your hand, at least none that I've found. I wish there were.