Best. Game. Ever.
For those who don’t know what Literati is, it is the Yahoo version of the classic game, Scrabble. While Yahoo does have Scrabble, it is not free 
I think I like Literati better because the computer serves out any letter it wants. For example, with Scrabble, there is only 1 Q, whereas literati could have 10 in one round (luckily that’s rare!).
Literati is like Scrabble in that you form words from the letters you are given which are placed on your tile rack. They are placed horizontally or vertically.
It can hold up to 5 players. But I only play 2 player games. Less crowded 
Each person gets 7 letters on their rack, and a blank to always start off with.
Each letter is worth from 1 to 5 points. The letters that are found less frequently in the English language are worth obviously more i.e. Z, Q, J, X are worth 5 points each. Blanks, which can be turned into any letter you wish have a value of ZERO.
The board is a 15×15 grid. Scattered on the board are ‘bonuses’ like 3W (total score of the word X 3), 3L (the letter placed on the 3L spot gets 3x the points of the value of that letter) and so forth.
It is great to come across these as it really maximises your score.
You can enter a room that is rated/not rated, 2 or more players, rooms where you have a time limit (which is made up by the person who created the room, I advise that you avoid these rooms), and rooms where you can challenge your opponent’s words!
Each room normally has dictionary.com to tell people if the word is valid or not, so if I placed ‘lol’ as word, it would tell me it’s not a word. In a challenged room, if you put ‘lol’ down, and you convince your opponent that it IS a word, and he/she does not challenge you, you got away with it. If they do challenge you, and they are correct, you get zero points. If they challenge you, and it is a word…then something happens. Bleh I forget. Don’t play challenge games! All too sneaky
Bingos are fantastic to get you off to a confident start. This is when you use all 7 letters on your rack at once. This will give you a minimum of 35 points, just for the bonus. The points you make for making that word are also added on. The largest score I’ve seen in a word bonus so far is 96 points, because he also placed the bingo word on a 3W.
Your room can be placed on Public, Private or Protected.
Public means anyone can come into play (if there is an empty seat) or watch you.
Private means only people you invite in can WATCH and PLAY with you
and Protected means people can come into watch, but they cannot play with you.
Hope that isn’t too confusing lol.
The game ends when the tiles have ran out or both players have passed (unable to make a word or some other reason) twice in a row. Or if they resigned or one player took longer than the ‘3 minutes/play’ rule, and the opponent can click ‘force forfeit’ to end the game and the person who took too long will have lost. So don’t take too long to think!
A new player starts off with a ranking of 1500. After 20 or so games played, they start to be rated. A win means your rating goes up obviously, and a loss means it goes down.
If a relatively low rated person competes against a highly rated person and the low rated person wins, then their rating will increase dramatically, while the highly rated person goes dowwwwwn.
I’m pretty highly rated and I don’t compete against low rated people because even if I do win, it doesn’t go up much because the computer or whatever knows that it’s an unfair game. So it’s best to play against someone at your own level.
Hmm…what have I missed? I should learn how to do things in an orderly manner…sigh.
Ok.
Tips on how to become a great Literati player are:
1. KNOW your 2 letter words. They are extremely handy and can often give you more points than a 6 letter word if placed in the right position.
Click HERE to see the list of 2 letter words ^^
3 letter words also come in handy, but I don’t know enough/all of them to list them.
2. Try to make a bingo at all times, it’s usually easiest in the beginning for me because you have the blank to help you out. It really sucks if you can make bingos but there is no place to put it
3. Remember suffixes and prefixes like es, s, ing, ed, tion, re, er, de, etc.
4. Take advantage of the free 3w, 3L, 2w, and 2L. BUT try to be clever, because sometimes it’s just not worth putting your word there if there is another spot that will give you more points. You also have to consider what they have on their rack, and if they place their word on the 3w, would it give them a lot of points? So it’s either block the 3w position, preventing them from placing a word there (IF they were gonna place the word there in the first place) or put your word somewhere else.
5. Often you can get a really bad pile of letters. Sometimes you can get all or mostly vowels, sometimes it’s all consonants…and sometimes Cs!!! The letter C is, as most literati players would agree with me is one, if not THE worst letter in Literati. There are not as many C words as you may think in english, and there are no 2 letter words with a C in them. You ask, but isn’t a Q worse? Maybe, but you don’t get it as often as the dreaded C. So this is not a tip, just a warning about the C lol.
That’s about all I can think of. Hope you weren’t TOO overwhelmed 
