Words With Friends 2: Dominate Your Friends With These 5 Strategies

Here’s a secret, a voluptuous vocabulary isn’t imperative to illustrious jocularity in Words With Friends 2. In fact, knowing big words like Antidisestablishmentism will get you *jack* in the recently sequelized Scrabble-alike.

Sure, a robust vocabulary helps, but success is not about big or complex words, it’s about simple words with the letters that count for big points. Meaning common words, when used correctly, are more valuable than complex words used poorly.

It’s actually shockingly easy to improve your Words With Friends game. So much so that if you follow these five tips, you’ll be dominating most of your friends in no-time. Thus, if you want to dominate your friends on the battlefield of the Modern English Lexicon – and *not* cheat by using a word generator read on for 5 Words With Friends tips and strategies.

1. “S” is for Sniping!

This is just about my favorite trick in Words With Friends. If you have an S, try to use it for two purposes. First, to extend one of your words to its plural tense in order to gain a double or triple word score, or, even better, use it to pluralize one of your opponent’s words, and build a new word with it.

If the word you’re building off of has quality letters in it, you get those points, plus the points for your new word, which is obvious. What may *not* be obvious is that this tactic can also cut into any major gains your opponent received from double word or triple letter scores, as you are getting all the ‘base’ points for your opponent’s word and then gaining points of your own, turning their epic play into just another word.

2. Focus on the board, not the words.

When I dominate at Scrabble or Words With Friends, inevitably someone will champion my vocabulary or knowledge of big words. My vocabulary has nothing to do with it. Words With Friends is a board game, and the key is *the board*. A word like ‘Ox’ in the right spot is infinitely more powerful than more complicated words without any bonuses or modifiers.

Thus, in the early going of the game – be mindful of what letters you’re using and where you’re using them. For example, if you’re going first in a match and *can’t* make it to the first double-letter score, it’s okay to ‘punt’ and play a simple word using common letters, saving your best letters and combos for a more advantageous board position.

As a soft rule, you shouldn’t be playing any letters worth more than 3 points *unless* you’re going to get bonus points on the board somehow, unless you’re desperate.

3. Shuffle Shuffle

This is a simple but effective strategy. Stumped? Hammer that shuffle button. It’ll re-arrange the letters over and over again, and if you’re mindful of common letter combinations or vowel placement, you’ll find yourself coming across the beginnings (or endings) of words you can use on the board. Since there’s no time-limit in Words With Friends 2, you can literally do this to your hearts content.

4. Common Combos

Enchanted Learning describes the concept I’m about to explain best: Consonant blends (also called consonant clusters) are groups of two or three consonants in words that makes a distinct consonant sound, such as “bl” or “spl.” Consonant digraphs include bl, br, ch, ck, cl, cr, dr, fl, fr, gh, gl, gr, ng, ph, pl, pr, qu, sc, sh, sk, sl, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, th, tr, tw, wh, wr.

When playing Words With Friends (or Srabble) these are the things you look for *first*. How can your letters combine best to form a good word worth a lot of points. Keeping this in mind turns ‘Hot’ to ‘Shot’, ‘Hone’ to ‘Phone’, and so on.

The idea is to get as much bang for your buck, and to do that, you need the ability to extend words a couple of extra letters – ideally to a double or triple word score. Knowing your digraphs, prefixes, and suffixes, are absolutely fundamentally key to that – especially if you’re trying to extend *another* player’s word.

5. X, Z, Q and Y marks the Spot.

Guard the letters X,Y,Q and Z with your life, and deploy them tactically. While I’m generally not big on memorizing words, do try to learn uncommon words using these letters, especially short two-three letter words. Placing these words in the right spot at the right time is paramount to continued success.

Most important you want to be aware of your board and try and combo these letters with pre-existing words. Meaning you can turn ‘Ox’ into ‘Toxic’. ‘Yes’ into ‘Eyes’. “Maze’ into “Amazed”…and so on. The key with these words is knowing how to get the *most* out of them, even if your opponent deploys them first.

More than anything, be mindful and strategic. In Words With Friends 2, a big word placed wrongly can doom you, and a small word placed smartly will win you the game – almost every time.

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