A Free Scrabble Game Player

That Tells You How To Win!

It's called Quackle, and it's not only a free Scrabble game, but also an artificial intelligence and analysis tool. What does that mean?

Well, it means that not only can you play a free game of Scrabble with Quackle, but you can have it critique your game as well!

Let me show you what the game looks like, and then I'll tell you a bit more about it. So here I am part way through a Scrabble game, getting my butt kicked by Quackle once again...

At first glance, you can see it's got all the features you'd expect. On front stage, in the center of the screen, there's the main playing area, displaying a Scrabble board and rack. To the left of the board is the score-sheet recording all the plays, scores and sub-totals. And on the right there's a tile-tracking box - this tells you which tiles are still unseen from your perspective.

Ok, as I said, that's pretty much what you'd expect. But the real fun starts in the analysis Quackle can do. Now I don't want this page to turn into a detailed tutorial, but let me just show you three key features that illustrate what I mean by 'artificial intelligence and analysis'.

FIRST — I can ask Quackle to tell me all the moves playable from the current game position. In the game above, here's what I get...

Cool, there's a bingo playable! But wait, not so fast...

SECOND — I can ask Quackle to run a simulation, by playing itself hundreds (or even thousands) of times, and tell me how often each of these moves ends up winning.

And herein lies the magic!

You see how in the game above I've just played the 'obvious' best play? I mean RAISINGS is a bingo, so I get 50 bonus points, and there are no other bingos here, right? Well, here's what a simulation tells me...

RAISINGS wins less than 1% of the time, while the humble two letter play AI wins more than ten times as often!! Doh! Why? The power of this great tool lies in you working through the game and working out why the results turn out that way. In other words, I'm not going to tell you why holding out on playing your bingo is the best thing to do here ;-)

THIRD — I can find out how many other mistakes I made during the game. All I do is ask Quackle to generate a full-game report. Presto! I get a blow-by-blow account of my whole game, warts and all...

There's plenty more stuff Quackle can do that I'm sure you'll find fun - like the built-in Scrabble word-finder, for instance. But you're probably scrolling down the page frantically looking for the 'download free Scrabble game' link and not even listening to me any more, so I won't hold you up any longer ;-)

Cool! Where Do I Get It?

Ok, ok, here's a link to the free Scrabble player download page.

NOTE — When I say Quackle is a free Scrabble game, I need to be careful with my terms. You see, the free bit is completely accurate, but the game is not technically (well, officially) Scrabble. Quackle markets itself as a generic 'crossword game', but, as I just showed you, it can be configured to play just like Scrabble.

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