The international Scrabble festival has been taking place since May 9th in Vichy and will conclude this Sunday, May 17th. Over 2,500 players from France, Belgium, and Switzerland are participating in various competitions held at the Palais des Congrès.
“Nîmes, in F5, in 6 letters,” reflects Aloys in a hushed tone in one of the rooms at the Palais des Congrès, where silence reigns. Players carefully examine their letters before placing them on the grid. This Friday, the doubles championship brought together pairs tasked with finding the best possible word together to try to match the score achieved by a computer.
“We came without pressure,” explains Robin, who signed up with Aloys: “here it’s a tournament for fun, for the atmosphere, to have a good time.” The two players have been playing Scrabble for over 10 years and follow a regular training regimen: “We play games to accumulate experience and master the grid. Then there is the vocabulary, so we start by learning short words with important letters, then longer words of 7 or 8 letters,” details the 21-year-old man.
More and more young participants are joining the festival, including the youngest, Gabin, who is only 8 years old: “Mom and dad played Scrabble all the time, I watched, I liked it, and so I started playing,” he explains while carefully arranging his letters on the grid. He is participating in the tournament with his father, Fabien, a former French champion, who “tries of course to play as best as possible, but the main thing is that Gabin has a good time, improves himself, understands where it’s interesting to play, the little words to know,” he smiles.
Passing on the game to younger generations is precisely one of the goals of the French Scrabble Federation: “We have an agreement with the national education system that allows us to intervene with facilitators in schools, and there is a school Scrabble competition, with a national final in Paris,” explains Jean-Jacques Capdeville, general secretary of the federation. The number of clubs continues to grow in France: in 2025, 896 Scrabble clubs were counted across the country.
