Scrabble (game show) wild card contestants competed in semifinal matches on Monday through Thursday. The four winners advanced to the final matches that Friday, with a grand prize of $100,000 for the winner. With slight adjusting, this tournament format became the new permanent "Scrabble" format on December 29, 1986. As noted above, each episode now featured four contestants and two Crossword games worth $500 each. The champion played in the first Crossword, whose winner set a Sprint time for the second winner to beat, and the Sprint winner received $1,000 and took or retained the championship. With this format change, "Scrabble" became a
Tile-matching video game game mechanic, rather than a distinct genre of games. The mechanism of matching game pieces to make them disappear is a feature of many non-digital games, including Mahjong solitaire and Solitaire card games. Jesper Juul traces the history of tile-matching video games back to "Tetris" and "Chain Shot!", published in 1984 and 1985. While both focus on pattern matching, they differ in important design points such as time pressure, tile manipulation and match criteria. A second generation of influential matching games – "Puzznic", "Columns", "Dr. Mario" and "Plotting" – was published in 1989 and 1990. Games building on "Dr. Mario"'s