Unlike my other projects, this one isn’t complete yet, but I’ll show what I’ve done so far. I was playing a lot of scrabble with my grandmother, and I always take a long time on my turns trying to find the highest scoring move, which made me wonder, “What’s the highest scoring move you could theoretically get?” Assuming an ideal setup, what’s the most points you can score in one move in scrabble?
I starting with the idea of using three triple letter tiles. To use all three, you need to create a fifteen letter word across one of the edges of the board, but you only get seven tiles to play. The only way to get all three triple letter tiles is if there are existing words spanning some of the gaps between the tiles. We want there to be exactly seven spaces free so we can play all the tiles. Additionally, we want the board to already have words perpendicular to the fifteen letter word so we can add on to them and get more points. In the code I call them cross words. The most important cross words are those next to the triple letter tiles. I wrote a program that will check every possible setup for the existing words along where our fifteen letter word will be and the triple cross words. Here is the result visualized (the letters played this turn are slightly tinted green):
Image created using Scrabulizer.
The score from this setup is 1724 points. Now all I have to do is find more cross words to increase the score! Well, not quite. My program doesn’t take into account the limited number of letters in scrabble. There are four Zs used in this scenario, but there is only one in standard scrabble. So if I’m able to account for that there isn’t much more work until I find the answer!
The code for this project can be found on GitHub here.