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The Great Rack'n'Rule Swindle*

The Internet is full of lies. This much we already knew. But more than that, it's full of innocent and trusting naiveté that causes the lies to spread far and wide, which is why every single piece of writing you'll find on the web about this game is almost entirely false and shouldn't be trusted. (With the exception of this page you're reading now, of course.) For reference we'll take the Play.com page, which is lifted from the same press release that every other site has also copied word for word and unquestioningly printed as gospel truth.

Exactly half of these claims are true. The other half, repeated on dozens of gaming websites across the net, are total lies. To find out which is which, and whether there have really been two completely different official DS Scrabble games released in the same month, read on.

Most of the dialogue in the Euro game's Campaign mode sounds like sinister homosexual innuendo.

We might as well deal with the second question first. The answer to it is, bizarrely, "Yes". Despite there already being a perfectly serviceable DS port of Scrabble, released by Ubisoft in 2007, this month has seen two entirely separate new versions appear. One, a European title from Ubisoft again, is basically an updated version of the 2007 game, claiming to feature the improvements listed in that box up above. The other, for the American market, is a radically new version built from the ground up by Hasbro and published by EA. Apart from both being Scrabble, the two games could barely be any more dissimilar, so let's take a closer look.

The most immediately obvious difference between the two versions is their orientation. The Euro game is presented in standard landscape style, whereas the US game is in the portrait format, requiring the DS to be held on its end like a book. This makes slightly more vertical room on the screen for the board, letter rack and interface icons, although there's no reason the Euro version couldn't have put the icons down the sides if it had wanted to. (Indeed, it would have been the most obvious way to do it. A real Scrabble board, after all, is asymmetrical as a result of listing the letter distribution down the side - a very useful feature which irritatingly is present on neither DS version - and showing that would have left the other side conveniently free to display the extra icons in a logical, natural way.)

Both games offer various visual options - in the Euro game you get three different board designs to choose from at the start, and can also earn a variety of unlockable background wallpapers to replace the standard green baize by playing the Campaign mode. (You can get all of them inside an hour with little effort.) The American version only gives you the standard US layout at the beginning, but has four unlockable "themes". These are opened up by moving through the game's six ranks, which you do simply by playing the game and accumulating points. The first theme - classic green baize and original board - is awarded when you reach the third ranking level, something which will take a normal player something in the region of six hours, and I'd imagine the other three come with ranks 4-6. Since the points required to move up a rank increase each time, I won't be finding out any time soon.

Most of the unlockable wallpapers are a touch on the fruity side too.


Though it looks much bigger here, onscreen the US board is only about 2mm wider and 2mm taller.

The European version comes with a roster of seven CPU opponents (plus one unlockable final "boss"), each of which has their own skill level, vocabulary and playing style. All of them play a decent game, each with individual quirks - Etemenenki, for example (the aforementioned boss character of the Campaign mode), will happily exchange tiles eight or nine times in a row rather than play a word, and he'll happily let you build up a 60 or 70-point lead while he does it, but when he does finally put one down it'll almost always be a multi-way monster that wipes out your advantage in the blink of an eye.

The American version, on the other hand, doesn't let you play against pretend humans at all, but instead offers a clutch of animal opponents including frogs, kittens and dinosaurs, all of whom can be set to one of six difficulty levels. In reality, though, there are only two levels - at settings 1 to 4, the CPU AI is absolutely retarded, to such a huge degree that there are no meaningful differences between the four settings. Even at the start of the game, a level 4 computer player will happily put down five two-letter words in a row, none of them scoring over five points, and with incredibly obvious higher-scoring and tactically-better options available on the board for the letters it's playing. It'll gladly open up triple-word squares for you with juicy Ws or nice easy Es adjacent, and pass up its own opportunities to take open triples.

Crank the difficulty up to 5 or 6, on the other hand, and you better get ready for the CPU's first or second word to be a seven-letter whopper scoring 80 or 90 points, because in roughly four games out of every five it will be. (Even the toughest opponents in the Euro version almost never pull out seven-letter words.) It's impossible to say whether this is a result of it simply having a huge vocabulary, or whether it's lazily bumping up the challenge by cheating when it deals itself the letters (I suspect the latter), but either way, against a level 5 or 6 opponent you should always expect to be at least 100 points behind by the third turn.

Go on, find FOULIE in a dictionary somewhere.

EPIC FAIL.

That leads us semi-smoothly into the games' respective vocabularies, both of which are rather unsatisfactory but in very different ways. The European game has selectable Normal and Junior variants, with the latter not allowing rude words while the former works from the full dictionary including naughty swears. (The CPU isn't above playing JISM, for example.) The US version, though, is kids-only, and won't even allow the likes of FART. Go Europe!

The Ubisoft game, though, has a different way of letting itself down. In the various anagram-based subgames, it'll repeatedly demand that you find words like HEAST, PIERT, EGMAS and FOULIE, all of which defy any attempt to find them in a respectable dictionary - including the official Scrabble one, as you can see from the pictures above. (Click on the lower one and try for yourself.) But just as the Euro version hangs its head in shame and begins to slink from the room in disgrace, the US game strikes back hard by inexplicably refusing to recognise the word SATELLITE (and I tried variant spellings), which is just abysmal.

Most idiotically of all, the two games aren't even consistent - GI is allowed in the Euro version but not the American one, for example, when you might (if anything) expect it to be the other way round. So as far as vocabulary goes (the one thing you need to get right in Scrabble, of course - it's a game ENTIRELY ABOUT VOCABULARY, you fucking halfwits), it's a dose of extremely hard kicks in the bollocks, with steel-toed boots and a long run-up, for all involved.

This is the actually-rather-handy optional onscreen dictionary.

So alert viewers will have spotted that we've just nailed the first of the several press-release lies, since the Foulie Incident proves that the Euro game is NOT in fact playing with the official Scrabble dictionary at all. We've established that playing the CPU in either game is fraught with random danger, as the DS pulls made-up words out of its ("Invalid word" - Ed), refuses perfectly good ones, deals itself highly suspicious racks and can't even keep its story straight about what is and isn't allowed. So what about bypassing the pitfalls of the flaky and/or cheating computer opponents, by playing against some real human people instead?

The Hasbro/EA game has both hotseat multiplayer and local-wifi options, with either a basic game (for up to four players) available in Download Play mode with a single cart, or all modes open if all players have their own copy of the game. The European version, however, only has the wifi options - that is, there is NO hotseat game if you've only got one DS. This is the second of the BLATANT LIES on the press release, repeated across dozens and scores of websites. The lack of hotseat play was probably the most common criticism levelled at the 2007 version, but despite claims to the contrary it's missing again, as is the online play also promised by the blurb. (I sent Play.com a customer review pointing out these facts in very moderate language, but they've declined to publish it.)

There's absolutely no excuse for it whatsoever - hotseat play in particular requires almost no coding effort, and Scrabble is hardly the most demanding game to implement online either, as anyone on Facebook will tell you. But there it is. Blatant, flat-out, transatlantic lying.

If you're wondering, the missing hard anagram on the right was GNARRED.

So we've still got one more lie to find. Bullet points 3 and 6 on the press release are wholly untrue, but 1 and 5 seem to be fairly solid, at least if we're allowing for divergence of personal opinion as to whether mini-games like Scrabble Hold'Em are "fun" or not.

(It certainly isn't, incidentally. Crossing Scrabble with poker is a totally brilliant idea, with the mechanics of the two games dovetailing perfectly, but the execution of it here is diabolical. The CPU players take so long to decide over their moves that if you're in the big blind you can easily be waiting 30 seconds before it's your go. Fold pre-flop and you've got about 1m30s of unskippable waiting around to do until you're allowed to play again. And even after all that thinking time the CPU's plays are often completely moronic, like shoving all in for 1000 chips to win a pot of 6 when they've got two 1-point tiles in their hand.)

That leaves us with 2 and 4. The thing bullet point 4 refers to (Campaign Mode) at least exists, and is fairly accurately described. Moving swiftly through a jokey Indiana Jones-esque plot, you find yourself undertaking a series of challenges ranging from finding single specific words on a preset board to beating opponents over the course of a shortened game (eg you just have to be in front after five turns to win). As already noted at the start of the feature it doesn't take long to finish - little over an hour should do it - and when you've done it once there's no reason to ever go back to it, but nevertheless it's there, so we can't take issue with point 4.

Which leaves us only with point 2, which appears to be mostly made-up. There's nothing in the European game which resembles the description of a "Scrabbler profile" which sets out to determine "which Scrabbler you are". All you have is your standard save-game slot (you get two, compared to four in the US version), which commendably records all sorts of high scores for the various game types (eg for Scrabble Hold'Em it records biggest pot won, fastest win and best word), and a blank box for "Achievements" which, rather pointlessly, doesn't tell you what any of them are. Since you don't know what the achievement is, the only way to achieve it is by accident, and I don't know about you, viewers, but I rarely find much sense of achievement in achieving things I didn't even know I was trying to achieve in the first place.

 If you zoom in in the US version, it doesn't scroll to show you the CPU's turn. Sigh.

And that's about that, really. There are various facets to both games that we haven't really covered here, but that's because most of them are rendered worthless by the failings above. The European version has a handful of other minigames, but apart from Puzzletters (which is quite nice, but is done better by the homebrew DS game Word Up) they're all based on trying to find fictitious words like FOULIE, and are therefore just wearisome exercises in putting down random gibberish anagrams until you stumble across the one the game is looking for.

There's also Tempest mode, which is a quite interesting attempt at making Scrabble more exciting by adding modifier cards. Before each turn you choose a card which, say, limits your opponent to playing a word of exactly four letters on their next turn, or lets you place a new triple-word square on the board. It's a fun idea, but it's been done so ham-fistedly that it's a confusing chore to play, and you'll try it once and then never bother again. And finally there's the option to play a Duplicate game in which both players get the same letters, which is apparently how they do it in proper Scrabble tournaments or something. So that's nice.

The US game has similar anagram-based training modes which are briefly and mildly diverting but don't seem to save any high scores, making them a total waste of time, and there's also a card game called Scrabble Slam which is utter rubbish.

 If I knew more about movies, I could make a clever joke here.

The obvious tragedy here is that if you were to smash both of these games to metaphorical pieces with a metaphorical hammer and then sift through the wreckage with a metaphorical sieve of some sort, there's enough good stuff to make one really fantastic Scrabble game.

If you took the basic core of the European game, retained the improvements that have been made over the 2007 version (you can now get definitions of every word on the board by tapping on them, not just the "main" one that was placed in the last turn), added the hotseat multiplayer and the optional extras from the US version (such as the handy onscreen list of all the permitted two-letter words), and generally bothered your arse to put any sort of effort or thought into it at all (like including Junior Scrabble and Super Scrabble), you could have an absolutely wonderful DS Scrabble that did everything a sane person could ever want it to and would sell a billion copies, because people love Scrabble and people love the DS.

Instead, two entire sets of cooks with radically different culinary ideas have had a stab at the same broth, and we've ended up with two half-cocked bowls of crap that a waiter's spat in. It's a crime, viewers, it really is. It's murder most foulie. 

* Really, really sorry.