Cheez-Its that my wife picked up for my day-before-birthday party. It made for a surprisingly playable—and an unsurprisingly delicious—game.

A couple of things to note about Scrabble Junior Cheez-Its:
1. They’re kinda big for Scrabble tiles. You may need to blow up your own board, or your game will be as cramped as ours was.
2. There are a lot more than 100 of them in a box. Instead of whining about how the regular game has too many I’s, you will love how many S’s the game has.
3. There are no numbers on the Cheez-Its. You’ll need a cheat sheet for scoring.
4. There are no blanks in the box. If you want some, sprinkle in some regular Cheez-Its. (Not Cheese Nips, though. They don’t look and feel the same. Seriously, who gets Cheese Nips when Cheez-Its are available?)

We found the game worked with a few simple rules changes:
1. When you play a word, you can eat any letters on the board you need to remove to make your word(s), but you must leave valid words in all cases. You score for any words you newly create, but not for ones unchanged by your play. (You aren’t required to remove letters from the board.)
2. You can never replace a letter with the same letter, nor can you remove a letter without replacing it.
3. You need not change the number of words on the board.
4. Each premium square only counts once. Sorry, you can’t get the same triple-word bonus eight times.
5. If you want to exchange tiles, you must eat them from your rack first.
6. Because of the sheer number of tiles in a box, you should pick a score which ends the game when someone hits it. (We picked 300.)

For example, Rei Nakazawa played PEEK at one point. I ate the second E, and played the A where that E was to make ACME. So I got points for both PEAK and ACME.

After playing as much Scrabble as we have, we found these rules changes tremendously liberating. You know that uncomfortable feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when someone plays a word right where you were going to play yours? Gone. Simply munch down the letters your opponent played, and play your word. In our game, Paul Peterson played DAZED, with the final D on the middle-left triple-word score. So I ate his Z (one of four played in the game), and made OUTDATED to hit the upper-left triple on the next play.

The rule about not needing to change the number of words on the board is also quite helpful. Simply changing one letter for another is a valid play. The words BOX and BUCK met at a B. That B changed several times, in ways I probably shouldn’t describe.

After nipping ahead to 300 points before everyone else, I tried to follow Paul’s final rules change: Winner eats the board. That, it turns out, is not a good rules change. It creates a very different kind of uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach.

Here’s a Cheez-It Scrabble puzzle to whet your appetite. If you play a game of Cheez-It Scrabble, tell us your results in the comments.

All images by Mike Selinker

Authors: Mike Selinker

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