Texas Scrabbl'em is a fun combination of poker and scrabble. The game works like this:

1. Players each get dealt two tiles face-down. First round of betting.

2. Three tiles are dealt face-up. Second round of betting.

3. A fourth tile is dealt face-up. Third round of betting.

4. A fifth tile is dealt face-up. Last round of betting.

If there's a showdown, the winner is the player who can put down the highest-scoring word on the board, using any combination of his tiles and/or the shared face-up tiles. The word has to fit with the words already placed, as per normal Scrabble rules. The word is placed on the board, and the remaining tiles go back in the bag. If all players but one fold, the winner doesn't have to show his tiles, and no word is put down that round.

The game ends when there aren't enough tiles left in the bag for another round.

I found a few people thinking along similar ideas (see link), but those are more 'Poker using Scrabble tiles' whereas my version is more 'Scrabble with poker-style betting'. The nice thing about my version is that you'll actually be playing a game of Scrabble, laying out words on the board as you go along, so players have to find the best words to fit into the layout, rather than simply seeing who can make the longest word each round.

The changing layout should help keep the game interesting: no good having a seven-letter word if you can't place it somewhere! A 'q' could be a good tile to hold when a 'u' is free on the board somewhere, but risky otherwise, like drawing to an inside straight. And does that guy who just raised your bet really have an 's' to put on the end of 'croissant' and sneak down to the triple word score, or is he just bluffing?
-- imaginality, Apr 29 2007

Prior Art http://typewriting.org/tag/poker/
Hold'em poker using Scrabble tiles [imaginality, Apr 29 2007]

WordKing Poker http://www.digitalc...e.com/products/whe/
More like poker with Scrabble tiles, but gets great reviews. [waxpancake, Sep 23 2007]

How do you play with words of 8 or more letters? Like "croissant" for example.
-- methinksnot, Apr 29 2007


In the example I mentioned, 'croissant' is already laid out on the board from an earlier round - maybe someone added 'croiss' to 'ant', or 'cr..ssant' to 'oi', or 'c.oi.sant' across two downward words with 'r' and 's' in).

Imagine it's laid out from left to right, the 't' being one space above and to the left of the middle-right triple word score.

Now, players holding an 's' have the chance to score highly by placing their 's' at the end of 'croissant', and laying a word downwards over the triple word score. So a starting hand with an 's' is a particularly good one to bet on, this round.
-- imaginality, Apr 29 2007


Fair enough then. Double letter scone for you.
-- methinksnot, Apr 30 2007


This is a great poker game even without the use of the scrabble board.
-- phundug, Apr 30 2007


Nice idea. Potentially you may want to increase the number of tiles on deal, flop, draw and river e.g. 3,3,2,1. Do you usually have 9 tiles in Scrabble - I can't remember. +
-- gnomethang, Apr 30 2007


[gnomethang], you get seven tiles in standard Scrabble, so it fits well with the 2, 3, 1, 1 of Hold'em, though you're definitely right that other variations (e.g. Omaha: 4, 3, 1, 1, and you have to use two of your hole tiles) would also be good to try.
-- imaginality, Apr 30 2007


Nice. Related to this, there is already a variant of Scrabble which avoids any unfairness caused by one person getting all the best letters by having a single rack of letters and giving the player who can come up with the highest-scoring word from these letters the points - other players score nothing.
-- hippo, Apr 30 2007



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