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
English-language Scrabble English-language Scrabble English-language Scrabble is the original version of the popular word-based board game invented in 1938 by US architect Alfred Mosher Butts who based the game on the letter distribution in "The New York Times" in English. The Scrabble variant most popular in English is standard match play, where two players compete over a series of games. Duplicate Scrabble is not popular in English, and High score Scrabble is no longer practised. Although English is a worldwide language, the official list of allowable words and some tournament rules change between territories. The main Scrabble associations in North America are