So the wife and I purchased a set of leettiles - which arrived last week and are rather delicious. The website outlines the 'rules' of leet scrabble, but I'll summarise the main differences below to save you having to find it all yourself.
There are 5 'number' tiles, namely 0, 1, 3, 4 and 7, which can be played instead of O, I, E, A or T, respectively. These tiles are all worth 2 points, rather than the 1 of their counterparts, however.
There are now 4 X tiles, which are only worth 3, and can be used instead of CKS in any word.
PH can be played instead of F.
There are 3 Zs (or at least, there were in our set, you're meant to get 2, apparently) which are only worth 2, and can be used instead of an S at the end of a word only (e.g. CATZ).
You can play 0R instead of RO in the middle of any word (e.g. FR0K).
J is worth 6.
Instead of blanks, you have asterisks, for reasons at least some of you will hopefully appreciate.
The letter distribution is obviously slightly changed. This is a picture of our set. The number of number tiles appears to have been selected so that there is still the same total number of that letter as in a regular set (so there are four As, five 5s giving 9 'A' tiles overall). There are also only two S tiles, which just about makes sense if you treat two of the Zs as Ss (as they have that property occasionally), which then leaves 1 Z tile, like a regular set.
Finally, a word made up entirely of so-called 'leet' tiles - 0, 1, 3, 4, 7, Z or *) scores double, which can be quite helpful, especially in combination with premium squares.
They're also quite sexy tiles (if you ask me).
We've had a few games with them (e.g.), but are not especially experienced players ourselves, so I thought I'd share this with you lot. One thing I've wondered is the significance of only one 10-point tile (Q), with the next highest value being 6 (J) and 5 (K). We're currently trying to put together our own word list, as there is a leet dictionary that comes with it, to which we're thinking of adding various things (file extensions being top of the list). I'm aware of Scrabble variants like clabbers, but this provides an interesting new twist with the combination of all the various substitutions which can produce words that are a bit hard to translate at first.
So, er, yeah, hopefully this will be interesting to at least someone
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