An Alternate Quiddler Solitaire Game

Just about one year ago a word-loving friend and I discovered the wonderful game of Quiddler. We became obsessed and played for days on end (yes, really) until our time together came to an end (we live in different states).

The Quiddler game comes with directions for one form of solitaire, and I have played this version often, but I find that it favors short words and doesn’t reward any skill in forming longer words.

Thus I have developed the following form of Quiddler solitaire which rewards the player for forming long words.

All rules of word formation which apply to the regular game apply in this game.

The Quiddler deck consists of 118 cards. 100 of them will be used in this game, in two hands of 50 cards each. This leaves some aspect of chance in knowing what letters you might get. Of course you can count occurrences of letters which are in short supply and if, for example, there are 2 Cs in the deck and you have used them both in the first hand, you know you won’t see any in the second hand. However, if you only saw one in the first hand you still might not see one in the second hand because it could be in the 18 unused cards.

Shuffle the deck and deal 50 cards face down into one pile. This is your first hand. Deal 18 cards into a discard pile face down. The remaining 50 cards are for the second hand.

Take the first 50 card pile and deal the top ten cards face up. Form words from these letters, replacing the cards as words are removed. No more than ten cards may be available at any time. Stack each word as it is removed crosswise, like a trick, or keep count in some other manner of the words formed.

If it is impossible to form any word from the 10 letters, replace one letter at a time from the deck. But each discarded letter must be counted as a word.

The hand is won if all 50 cards are made into words. I have been able to win about 75% of the time.

Repeat with the second hand of 50 cards.

You could play just to win or lose, but I like the scoring option because it does reward the making of longer words.

Scoring: You want to make as few words as possible, eg. reward yourself for forming longer words. Add the number of words made in each hand together for your game score. My scores have ranged from 29 to 22, with 22 being the best, of course.

If a hand is lost you must add the number of left-over letters to your word count. In other words, if you made 13 words, but had one letter left over at the end, your score for that hand would be 14.

Theoretically, just as there are some astronomical odds of all four players in a bridge hand being dealt a perfect hand, it would be possible for the best score in this game to be 10, where each set of 10 cards dealt could be made into a word. This would need to happen ten times in a row for that to be true. And yet, perfect bridge hands have been dealt!

I won’t venture to say what an average score might be. I’m a pretty good player, so I can’t really say if scores of 27 or 28 are average, although that is my suspicion. A score of 28 would imply that you had made 10 words of 4 cards each, and 2 words of 3 cards each, and 2 words of 2 cards each, in each hand. (In the Quiddler deck there are a few cards which have letter combinations on them so a 4-letter word might require only 3 cards to form.)

As I play more, I’ll add to the statistics of my scores.

Are there any word buffs out there who want to try to beat my score of 22? Go for it!