What is Scrabble (2000)?

With buckets of blood pouring from some Mac games, it’s nice to know other titles take the higher ground. MacSoft’s Scrabble is one such game — it's fun and playable for the whole femily.

Scrabble presents a 3D board with various textures and backgrounds and large, easy-to-read tiles. The programming sticks to classic Scrabble rules (no proper nouns, no place names, and so on), and lets you play against up to three opponents, human or cybernetic. You can play against the computer at Novice to Champion levels, or against other Mac users over AppleTalk or TCP/IP. However, you can't take on the Windows world over a network.

We found the game intellectually challenging and easy to use. If you get stuck, it offers anagrams, a built-in dictionary, and hints. You may find the latter a little too helpful — we eventually turned them off. The lounge-style background music became a little grating after a while. We appreciated the option to replace it with our own MP3 collection.

Unfortunately, Scrabble demonstrated a couple of bugs. The game crashed twice, and the function that picks random tiles after every turn failed once. And finally, winning the game is rather unsatisfying. All you get is a window saying you've won, a slightly sour-sounding, “Thank you for playing," and some weak cheering.

Overall, if you're looking for a good family game, Scrabble is worthwhile.

Shuchat-Marx, Mark. (November 2000). Scrabble. MacAddict. (pg. 51).

Download Scrabble (2000) for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver