Read on to learn a few more tips on enjoying your game of Facebook Scrabble Worldwide. When you click on NEW GAME you must first select settings from Player, Skill and Timer. With the first you are choosing how many persons you want in your game: Any, Two, Three, and Four. I would suggest that you begin with the ‘Any’ until you feel out your favourite number. I believe most Scrabble aficionados would settle for one-to-one combat.

Skill levels are really self-rated. The game does a private ranking for each player, for example as of this article my rating is 451 but I’m not too sure what that means. But in the game room you get to decide your skill level. You choose from: Any, Beginner, Casual, Serious, Expert. Unless you are a sadist or masochist you probably have no desire to get beat up or to squish scrabble babies, but you want to win most of your games.

So your instinctive click will be to check the player profile. Which means you move the cursor over the player's photo.

Your secret agent work will yield something like this:

Status: Idle

Games: 250

Won: 95

Top Score: 354

For me the most important number is the top score. If an opponent’s top score is too far removed from mine the game is unattractive. I also gauge the psychology of the player by percentage of wins. If they have a low win ratio then they are likely to be hungry for a victory and will forfeit me if I delay just a few seconds over my time, a below the belly knockout.

Which brings me to the third menu in settings. This refers to time per play, not length of game.

Timer: Any, 2 Min, 5 Min, 1 Day, 1 Week. Adrenaline rush short gamers will play 5 minutes or less. People who like the scenic route will stick to Any.

I play two types of game: a short game of 2 or 5 minutes per play, and a long game that uses the 1 week setting but which Can take as long as forever. I am now in the middle of a game with a friend in England which is going on for nearly a month. We ignore the timer completely; we trust each other that no one will click forfeit. For once you have exceeded the timer your opponent may forfeit the game in their favour.

Here are three hints on how to best enjoy your Facebook scrabble game:

1. Spend some time doing your social networking before you open the game. I have found that once you begin playing you will have to leave the game screen to return to Facebook proper. I don’t know about recently but I have found that to open two Facebook tabs at the same time does not run smoothly; which means that you had best remain in the game unless you don’t mind reloading it. Time consuming, but the good news is that you reload the active games.

2. Facebook Scrabble or Scrabble Worldwide can eat into your time for family and work. So I recommend temperance. Best achieved I believed by using the settings option to select the longest possible option for you and your opponent. You can begin a game in January and still be in middle of it in April. When you have lots of time to burn then you can play some shorter games, without cancelling your main longer game, since the platform allows for several games to be played at the same time.

3. Keep rearranging your rack to see what turns up. You do by clicking SHUFFLE or by manually moving around the tiles. Like I said in my other Facebook Scrabble hub, the dictionary is right there in the game to check words.