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You are playing English Scrabble solo, but on a 15×15 board that looks like this:

15 by 15 board, with the star in the top left corner, all square grids are Quad Word square

The starting square is the top-left corner and all 225 squares are quadruple word squares. The game ends when you place all tiles on the board, and you can choose your rack's contents as you want from the remaining, unused tiles at every turn. All other rules are the same, including the 50-point bingo bonus.

Can you score at least 3.8 million points using this board and the CSW19 lexicon? (After you do so, what is the highest score you can get?)

This puzzle came about while I was playing with Quackle and its ability to handle custom boards.

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  • $\begingroup$ Where did you get the number 3.8 million? $\endgroup$
    – mathlander
    Commented Jan 8, 2023 at 22:18
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @mathlander That's what I got on my end. $\endgroup$ Commented Jan 9, 2023 at 0:54
  • $\begingroup$ You may be please to hear that Mack Meller has done a video on exactly this $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 5, 2023 at 9:17

1 Answer 1

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I was able to come up with this:

4113296 points

Move Score
1. 1A HYDROXY 393266
2. H1 LOCKJAW 376982
3. A1 (H)OSPITAL 213042
4. A1 (HOSPITAL)IZATION 475186
5. 1A (HYDROXYL)APATITE 557106
6. O1 (E)THEREAL 180274
7. O1 (ETHEREAL)ISATION 294962
8. 12H RUNABOU(T) 163890
9. 3D VERE(C)UND 229426
10. 7D UNCO(W)LED 229426
11. D5 SQ(U)iDGES 294962
12. 15H EMBIGGE(N) 229426
13. M1 (I)NFIRMER 213042
14. 10H WAVEOfF(S) 262194
15. H10 (W)I(R)E 112
Total 4113296

Of course it's critical to always play 7 letters for the 16384x point bonus - the whole problem is about making those 14/15 letter words (I got 3, it's certainly possible to make 4 or 5+) and re-using high-value letters in them, which I only did well with my X... So it's for sure possible to get 5 million, but this is already nice enough.

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