Want to Try Manual Tile Counting?

For a comparison of methods see this article: TileCounter vs. Tracking Sheet

Tracking and counting tiles is officially recognized and sanctioned by the National Scrabble Association, so you can check out almost any Scrabble club worldwide. 

You'll save 1.99, and maybe even see some interesting photographs.

You won't find much really tailored for mobile app games—being paper—but that does make it easy to fold them up and stuff them in your pocket.

And don't forget your pencils.  Don't want to be playing a game away from home and not have a sharp pencil.

Maybe you shouldn't play at all when you're not at home. They weren't really designed for that 'moving around and playing whenever and wherever you want' business. They're made more for live tournament play, or sitting around waiting for Aunt Darlene to make her move.

But we believe that manual tile tracking is better than none at all.

If you're new to the concept, and you want to see what manual tracking is all about, here's a few sites to get you started.

Scrabble Resources from The National SCRABBLE^® Association (NSA)

Calgary Scrabble® Group

Australian Scrabble^® Players Association (ASPA)

Seattle SCRABBLE® Club

Ottawa Scrabble Club

If you're a Words with Friends player, you're probably out of luck. The standard procedure for us is to scrounge around for the back of an envelope and rough it out. It's the rebel in us.

And the fact we don't have anything else.

Until now.

Tracking sheets come in many varieties, endlessly customized in an attempt to make manual tile tracking more intuitive, easier to assess at a glance the status of played tiles, and to reduce errors. Here are a few variations based on Scrabble Letter Distribution (blanks typically represented as? on grid, although tileCounter represents blanks as *:

Alphabetical:

A sample of the same letters in a customized format. Note how the letters are not in alphabetical order, but in an order that groups vowels along the same 'sight-line' to the left and isolates key letters (singles: Q Z J X K), esses, and blanks:

Another version with Key Letters Isolated:

For Words with Friends, the grid would look different due to the difference in total letter distribution and letter frequency. Get the Words with Friends Letter Distribution and Letter Frequency list here. Find the Scrabble Distribution list here.