How to Score Big in Words With Friends in Your Next Game Night

Words With Friends can be a fun and friendly game that keeps you and your buddies sharp and in contact amid your busy schedules. It can also be endlessly infuriating if you continuously struggle to get high scores. The following will explore some strategies you can apply to your gameplay to help you improve your scores (and finally knock that one friend off their high horse).

Based on Scrabble's classic board game, Word With Friends is a digital game involving placing letters you have onto a board to spell out words and gain points. Rarer letters are worth more points, as are individual squares on the board. Those at an inherent advantage have a more extensive vocabulary as they are more likely to spot a word they know amid the letters they can see.

Improve Your Vocabulary

If you're playing the long game and want to make sure that you're consistently coming out on top, game after game, you need to improve your vocabulary. One of the only proven ways to do this is to read more. Not only should you read more to develop a vast vocabulary, but you also need to be reading widely. This means reading different kinds of texts—newspapers, scientific magazines, fiction novels, non-fiction novels, literary short stories, etc. Online articles almost don't count as consistent. They are chalked full of repetitive long-tail keywords and use the simplest wording possible (to apply to the largest audience).

Use a Tool

Let's say that you're typically quite good at the game, but you're stuck with a group of letters that you don't have any idea what to do with. There are online tools available that can help you with unscrambling letters into useful words. You can also play around with these tools when you're not in the middle of a game as a form of practice. Once you see how many words can come from a series of letters, you might find your mind opened a bit. For example, with a tool like Unscrambled Words, you can search for 6 letters words that start with H and end with N. It will give you all the possibilities, improving your vocabulary in the process, and helping you win word games!

Reduce Stress for a Stronger Game

When we're under stress as humans, we have trouble precisely the kind of mental reasoning we need to excel at Words With Friends. Consider changing up the background music to ease your nervous system. You might be shocked to discover how much your game has improved when you take a second to soothe yourself before you play.

Keep a List of Two Letter Words on Your Phone

Please take an hour and compile a list of all the possible two-letter words and save it on your phone notes section. This way, when you're in a pinch, you can still gain a few points with the tiles that you have.

Be Aware Of What You're Setting Your Opponents Up For

At the beginning of the game, sometimes you can damage your competition by starting with a nice long word (five letters or more). This is because you've now given your opponent five letters to play around with. They might not have had a word in their tiles ready to go, but you could end up giving them the missing piece. Pay special attention to how many vowels you're leaving open for the next player.

Use The Colored Squares

The fastest way to improve your score is to pay attention to where you're placing your tiles, sometimes even more so than what tiles you're setting. This is because those double word, triple word, double letter, and triple letter colored squares make a massive difference in the number of points awarded.

You might even want to hold onto more extended, more vital words until those spaces become available. There's no harm in placing a few two or three-letter words as you wait for the board to fill out and reach those colored squares. Pay special attention to whether there are vowels next to colored squares (and therefore, watch out for leaving a vowel next to one—don't make things too easy for your opponent).

Save Up Your "S" Tiles And Blank Tiles

The "S" tiles are far more valuable than most people give them credit for. This is because you can pop one onto the end of so many words and get the full word points. Save up your "S" tiles so that when your opponent gets a pleasant 40-50 point word, you can get those points as well. The same goes for the blank tiles, which can be used as an "S." Save them up.

With the above tips, you should be well on your way to getting better scores in Words With Friends. The more you play, the more second-nature these strategies will feel to you.