Anagrams (game)

Anagrams is a tile-based word game in which players rearrange letters to form words, drawing from a shared pool of face-down tiles that are flipped over one at a time. A player may claim a newly revealed tile to start a word, add it to an existing word of their own, or steal and extend a word already claimed by an opponent by rearranging its letters into a new, longer word. The game has also been published under the names Anagram, Snatch and Word Making and Taking, and is reputed to date from the Victorian era, with an early modern version released by Charles Hammett in 1877. Because Anagrams has never been formally standardized, many differing house rules exist for how tiles are drawn, claimed and stolen. Many present-day players use letter tile sets originally produced for other word games such as Scrabble or Bananagrams rather than a dedicated Anagrams set, and the game is considered a forerunner of later tile-stealing word games.