Scrabble variants are formed. This variation is also used on "Scrabble Showdown". This game has the same size board and nearly the same scoring system as Scrabble. The major differences are the inclusion of twelve wild tiles marked with an asterisk that may represent one letter or any series of letters and special board squares that convert a regular letter tile into a wild tile (the tile in question is placed upside down on such a square). The nature of these changes shifts the emphasis of the game from playing short words to playing words of any length. For example, QUA*IST, could
Scrabble letter distributions at any time. Several online tools exist for counting tiles during friendly play. Diacritical marks (such as "é" in words borrowed from French) are ignored. English-language editions of Scrabble contain 100 letter tiles, in the following distribution: The total number of points is 187. When Alfred Butts invented the game, he initially experimented with different distributions of letters. A popular story claims that Butts created an elaborate chart by studying the front page of "The New York Times" to create his final choice of letter distributions. In 2004, Super Scrabble was launched. For international distribution outside the United States and