Words Made Only of One-Point Letters

Five letters in WyldTyle are worth a single point: E, N, R, S, and T. They are also the letters the dice roll most often. Around 180 playable words are spelled with nothing else, and while none of them will impress anyone, they are the words that finish boards.

Why these words matter

A word made only of one-point letters scores exactly its length: TENT is 4 points, ENTREE is 6, RENTER is 6. That is roughly half what an average word of the same length scores. On the face of it, they are the words you want to avoid.

But look at the dice. T is on four of the thirty consonant faces, and N, R, and S are on three each. E is on three of the ten vowel faces. Together, these five letters account for more than 40% of every consonant roll and 30% of every vowel roll. They are what the game hands you, over and over, and a player who can turn a pile of them into valid words will complete far more boards than a player waiting for something better. Every completed board is worth 20 bonus points, which is more than the entire difference between a cheap word and an expensive one.

The small number after each word is its WyldTyle score with no wild tiles. Letter values are on the scoring guide.

Patterns worth knowing

• The -ER and -EST families. RENTER, TENTER, NESTER, TERSEST, and TENSEST are all here. If you have a stack of Es, Ts, and Rs, one of these endings will absorb them.
• Doubling up. ESSES, TESTS, TENTS, RESTS, and NESTS show how happily these letters repeat. A second S or T is never wasted.
• Short fillers count. EN, ER, ES, ET, NE, and RE are all valid. They exist to save two-letter slots at the very end of a game.

Balancing cheap and expensive

The best boards mix the two. Use the cheap, common letters as the framework of every word, since they are what you will actually roll, and drop the four- and five-point letters into that framework when they appear. A six-letter word built as T _ _ K E T becomes TICKET, worth 13, the moment an I and a C arrive. The one-point letters did the structural work; the K supplied the points.

For the other end of the scale, see the K and V words. For how the values fit together into a whole-board score, see the scoring guide.