Snap Attack

SNAP ATTACK

Sorting 114,575 words…

How Snap Attack works

Rebuilt from the game's published description. Two and a half minutes, one rack, one board.

The board

Eight squares across, seven down — smaller than a Scrabble board. Two or three words come pre-placed and locked: those are the dark tiles. Bonus squares sit on the empty squares, letter multipliers in blue and word multipliers in red.

The rack

Seven movable tiles, and they are yours for the whole round. Tiles are never spent. Place them, score, pick them up, place them somewhere else. Shuffling the same seven letters around is the entire game.

Making a snap

A snap is any arrangement where the board reads true. It scores automatically, the instant it is valid:

Every run of two or more letters, left-to-right and top-to-bottom, is a word.
Every tile you placed is part of at least one word.
Everything on the board hangs together in one connected mass, so your tiles are attached to the locked words.

One word is a single-snap; two or more at once is a multi-snap. Each distinct arrangement scores once — building AD then MAD then MADE is three separate snaps, which is exactly how you run a score up.

Scoring, in order

Multiply the value of any tile sitting on a letter multiplier.
Add up the letters in each word your tiles touch.
Multiply that word by any word multiplier it crosses.
Add the words together, then multiply by the tiles-used multiplier.

Tiles used	1	2	3	4	5	6	7
Multiplier	×1	×2	×3	×5	×8	×12	×18

That last step is why long snaps are worth so much more than short ones, and why it pays to keep adding letters rather than rearranging from scratch.

Two-letter words

Memorising them is the single most useful skill here. A seven-tile play usually only works because five little cross-words — QI ZA XU OE AE — all happen to be legal.

Words

Full Collins/SOWPODS tournament list, trimmed to the 114,575 words of two to eight letters that can physically fit this board.

Wikipedia gives the board size, the snap types and the four scoring steps, but not the tiles-used multiplier table or the bonus-square layout. Those are reconstructed to match reported scoring — a decent player averaging a couple of thousand a round.