Guest Author - Megan Romer

The Big Book of ScrabbleGrams is a cool puzzle book that is published by Sterling Press. ScrabbleGrams have been around for many years now, and ScrabbleGrams are available in many national newspapers. A ScrabbleGram is a simple word puzzle which gives you a "rack" of seven letters. Your job? To find the longest word playable on the rack. Often the best words are 7-letter words, but sometimes the longest ones are only 5 or 6 letters long.

These puzzles are a great way to practice your Scrabble rack strategy and "anagramming". They're also a really nice twist on puzzles (fans of Crosswords, Sudoku and especially Jumble will definitely enjoy these as a nice change). I found that doing a couple of the puzzles before playing a Scrabble game was surprisingly helpful, it made for a great warmup.

One of the best things about this book is that it's spiral bound, making for super-easy puzzling on a train or plane; you can simply lay it flat on your seat tray, instead of being forced to hold it open or break the spine to keep it open. It's a feature that most of the New York Times Crossword Puzzle books have, but not many others.

I've found most travel editions of Scrabble to be somewhat unwieldy, they seldom lie flat and the little letters often get lost, so I've long since given up on travel Scrabble, but these puzzles are a great way for me to enjoy my favorite game even when I can't play a full-length version of it. Wonderful! I'm really hoping these catch on and a whole line of the books become available, because I'm nearly done with mine and I'll want more soon!