I'm not a fan of Scrabble, but I love Take Two. Some of us played it during Seafest. Whatcha do is you take Scrabble tiles (no board), lay them all face down on the table.
Then everyone takes 4 tiles to begin. You flip the tiles over at the same time, and plays essentially a solo form of Scrabble.
In other words, everybody forms their own Scrabble like structure (but without a board so there is no 3 letter score or anything like that). The object is to use up all your tiles forming words. After someone has used their 4 tiles forming a word or two, the person shouts "take two!" and everyone takes two more tiles, regardless of whether or not they could use up their tiles. Play continues like this until all the tiles are used up.
If at any point everybody agrees they cannot use up their tiles, everyone just takes two more tiles and play continues.
The interesting part of this game is that you can completely rearrange your entire structure at will. It will put you behind in the race to use up your tiles to do so, but can be nice if there are a lot of tiles out and nobody can play. At lot of times, restructuring opens up many new possibilities. I sometimes do it for aethetic reasons too, because I can form a long and cool word.
You can play this a number of ways, from whoever uses all their tiles first wins and you add up the wins, or you can keep score off of the number on the tiles (like Scrabble scoring without the bonuses), and unused tiles count against the score; for example, Bill used tiles to score up to 30 points, but had 20 points from unused tiles, so for that round he receives 10 points. In this score variation, play stops once someone uses all their tiles. And if someone, after the game stops, has a misspelled word or a made-up word and is caught doing it, they have to take the word out and dismantle their structure accordingly. However, if it is something like "sometheming," any words that exist in there can remain. So in the case of "sometheming," "some" or "them" can remain, but the rest of the tiles drop off. If this kills half of someone's structure...them's the breaks.
You can also award bonuses for being the person who uses all the tiles, or for the longest word, or vote for coolest word, or most number of words. We've even played where somewhere in the structure you must have a word in some theme, such as an animal, or you cannot say you have used all your tiles.
Oh, and another way to play it is by having a dictionary on the table for anybody to use, but the game does not pause while the person is looking up a word. It's good to look things up while stuck, and everyone else is too, but it will take you out of the game if you are not careful.
It's a fun game and gets pretty crazy, especially when you are hoping for vowels (or the opposite and have too many of them) and someone keeps shouting out "Take two!" every few seconds, leaving you with a jumble of tiles that you can't think to do anything with. It's one of my all time favorite games, mainly because I like the idea of Scrabble, but hate the slow pace that it always has.
Back on topic - I just remembered another favorite board game: Dark Tower.
) that you've enjoyed and why, or are there board games out there you've tried that you wish never crawled their way up to our plane?
Congratulations! Hopefully I'll be able to find some people who'll play Risk with me, seems like most people don't want to give board games of any sort a try....
) This one, due to its changing nature, can be picked up and played immediatly with little problem.