Scrabble was always my favourite game when I was young. I used to play it a lot with my mum and get really cross that she always beat me and I can still count on the fingers of one hand, the number of times that I have actually beaten her. We have Scrabble in our games cupboard and my eight year old loves it, but does get a little frustrated sometimes as he is so competitive. The six year old just doesn’t have the patience as games have to be short and fairly easy to play to keep him amused. So when we were asked to review Scrabble Junior by Mattel, I was interested to see what they thought of it.
Junior Scrabble is two games in one which makes it suitable for 5 to 10 year olds. It is the familiar format of the original game of Scrabble, with the bag of letter tiles and the board; however this board is double sided and there is also a set of blue counters which are used for keeping score.
The game is very simple and you have five letters each, at a time and you take it in turns to put down two letters on any of the words on the board. The words only have the first letter marked on the board, but there is a picture to show you what the word is. Every time you complete a word, you are awarded a blue counter.
I have to say that we really enjoyed playing this and it was nice to see that L got so involved in the game too. He liked the fact that he was building up a nice little stash of blue discs and it was good to see him thinking about how the words were spelt too. And who won, do you think??
Flip the board over and you have the Level 2 game which is called ‘Colours and Counters’, which is suitable for children aged seven and over. This is much more like the traditional game of Scrabble. The aim of this game is to score as many points as possible by making up complete words which interlock vertically and horizontally on the board. Players score points for the number of letters they use and in addition, they can win bonus points if their word is on top of a red or blue Bonus square.
The words can be two letters or over and you need to keep a running total of the points, so this is excellent training for the traditional game of Scrabble when they are bigger. L didn’t fancy this as it involved a little too much thinking for his liking, so I grabbed R to play this one. He is eight and this was perfect for him.
This level was a little slower than the ‘Words and Pictures’ level as you need time to look at the board and think about how to best achieve the biggest number of points. Naturally, I lost for the second time, but I will beat them next time.
Overall, we all liked this game. I think that L was pleasantly surprised by how much he enjoyed his game and he has challenged me to a rematch. R found the Level 2 easier to manage than the traditional game and said that he preferred playing that one for now as it was ‘ a bit less tricky’. With both games, there is no doubt that the game is perfect to help build children’s confidence with spelling and literacy and if they are enjoying themselves a long the way, even better!
We were sent Junior Scrabble for the purposes of this review. All opinions are entirely our own.
Great review I loved junior scrabble
Really good review thank you for making my Christmas shopping a little easier