  In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a
bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of
variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a
head-to-head match against a superior player, and more difficult to determine
the true ability of a player in a tournament or contest. I propose a new format
for drawing tiles in a two-player game that allows for the same tile pattern
(though not the same board) to be replicated over multiple matches, so that a
player's result can be better compared against others, yet is indistinguishable
from the bag-based draw within a game. A large number of simulations conducted
with Scrabble software shows that the variance from the tile order in this
scheme accounts for as much variance as the different patterns of letters on
the board as the game progresses. I use these simulations as well as the
experimental design to show how much various tiles are able to affect player
scores depending on their placement in the tile seeding.
