Most word finders quietly score everything as Scrabble and hope you do not notice. This one uses the Words With Friends values, where N and U and L all cost more, so the word at the top of the list is the word that actually pays best in the game you are playing.
People carry Scrabble instincts across and then wonder why their scores do not follow. These are the four changes that actually alter how you should play.
N, L and U are all two points here and one in Scrabble. That sounds trivial until you notice how many words are built almost entirely from those letters. UNUSUAL is worth seven in Scrabble and twelve here, which is nearly double for the same seven tiles.
Thirteen Es, seven Ts, five Ss. Plurals are noticeably easier to reach and racks clear faster, which is why a typical Words With Friends score runs higher than a typical Scrabble score even between the same two players.
The app validates before it places. No challenge, no penalty, no arguing over a dictionary. It makes the game friendlier and it also means there is no reason not to try the strange-looking word the solver found.
Triple word squares sit further in from the edges, so the corner-lane play that wins Scrabble games is not really a thing here. Expect the action to stay closer to the centre and plan your openings accordingly.
This is the chart worth looking at properly. Green is Scrabble, amber is Words With Friends, and the letters printed in red are the ones where the two games disagree.
The cheap letters are almost identical: the vowels plus R, S and T are one point in both games. All the movement is in the middle of the alphabet, and it runs mostly one way.
V costs five here against four in Scrabble, and J is ten rather than eight. J, Q and Z are all ten, so a rack holding two of them is genuinely difficult rather than merely annoying.
H and Y are both cheaper in Words With Friends, three against four. That makes H the most useful letter to re-learn if you move between the games, because a word like HITCH swings from 13 down to 12 while almost everything else swings upward.
| Value | Letters | Tiles |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Blank | 2 |
| 1 | E | 13 |
| 1 | A | 9 |
| 1 | I | 8 |
| 1 | O | 8 |
| 1 | T | 7 |
| 1 | R | 6 |
| 1 | S | 5 |
| 2 | D, N | 5 each |
| 2 | L, U | 4 each |
| 3 | G | 3 |
| 3 | H | 4 |
| 3 | Y | 2 |
| 4 | B, C, F, M, P, W | 2 each |
| 5 | K, V | 1 K, 2 V |
| 8 | X | 1 |
| 10 | J, Q, Z | 1 each |
The Scrabble tile distribution chart is on the Scrabble page if you want to compare what is actually in each bag.
There is no score penalty for swapping and there are more good tiles in the bag, so the odds of pulling something usable are better than they are in Scrabble. If your rack is four consonants you cannot join and a U, take the swap on turn two rather than grinding out eight points a turn for the next three moves.
Thirty-five points is good, not transformative. In Scrabble it is often correct to take a weak turn to preserve a seven-letter chance. Here, a forty-five point play in front of you is usually just better. Take the points.
This is the habit that separates people who have adjusted from people who have not. A word full of Ns, Ls, Us and Ds quietly scores well here and would be nothing in Scrabble. Sort the results by the Words With Friends column and you will start noticing plays your Scrabble brain skips over.
You can safely play a word you do not know the meaning of, and the game will simply refuse it if it is wrong. There is a good argument for looking the word up afterwards anyway, which is why the definitions in the results open in place rather than sending you elsewhere.
Because it uses its own letter values. The clearest case is N: one point in Scrabble, two in Words With Friends. H goes the other way, four in Scrabble and three here. U and L both cost two rather than one.
Add those up across a word and the gap gets real. HANDY is 12 in Scrabble and 11 here. Sort the results above by the Words With Friends column and the order genuinely changes.
One hundred and four, against Scrabble's hundred. The extra four are spread across the letters the game leans on: thirteen Es rather than twelve, seven Ts rather than six, five Ss rather than four, and five Ds and Ns.
More S tiles is the change you feel most. Plurals are easier to reach, so racks clear faster and games tend to run higher scoring than Scrabble.
No, it is thirty-five points here rather than fifty. Still worth chasing, but the arithmetic shifts. A forty point play now often beats holding tiles for a bonus, where in Scrabble the same decision would go the other way.
No, and this is the biggest practical difference between the two games. Words With Friends checks the word against its dictionary before it lets you place it. An invalid word simply will not go down, and there is no penalty for trying.
That changes what a solver is for. In Scrabble you are partly checking legality. Here the game does that for you, so the only question left is which of the legal plays scores best.
You lose the turn, which is the real cost, but there is no point penalty. Given that the game will not let you play a bad word anyway, swapping out a hopeless rack early is usually better than grinding out six points a turn with it.
They are not. The Words With Friends board has its own arrangement, and the triple word squares sit closer in from the edges than Scrabble's corner lanes do. The upshot is that big plays tend to happen nearer the middle of the board and the game feels less like a race for the corners.
Worth loading up your actual board before deciding, because a play that looks second best on paper is often first once you can see where it lands.