The goal of Maranga is simple enough: Take a bag of 100 random letters and organize them into real words until you’ve used them all. Sounds simple, right? But “simple” is not the same as “easy,” and beginners will find plenty of challenges just getting the bag emptied.
What are those challenges? First, you only get 7 tiles at a time, so your options are limited. As the game progresses, you’ll have more tiles to work with, but those early moves can be tricky, depending on which letters come out first.
Second, you’re only allowed to bank real words, of 2 letters or more. Maranga uses a fairly generous dictionary, made by combining the word lists used by a number of other word games, but if you try to play a word that isn’t in it, you’ll earn a strike. Collect three strikes and the game is over. So be careful with words you aren’t sure about. Those three strikes can really sneak up on you.
Eventually though, even if you stay frosty and strike-free, you may draw a set of tiles that contain no valid words. Don’t worry though, because you still have a move: Maranga let’s you reuse the tiles you’ve already played. At any time, you can unbank a previously played word and add its letters to the ones on your rack. (To a limit of 21 tiles on the rack, plus 21 more in the assembly area.)
That gives you up to 42 letters to work with at a time, but there’s a catch: Any tiles you unbank will turn red, and you must play all red tiles back up into the bank before any new tiles can be drawn from the bag.
Two Stages
There are two distinct challenges to Maranga: The first is to get all the tiles out of the bag and organized into words. The second is to reorganize those banked words into longer ones that are worth more points. Remember that the game isn’t over until you’ve earned all 3 strikes, so if you haven’t struck out, you’re probably leaving points on the table. With most bags, you can double or even triple your score in the second stage, so it really does pay to keep working at it.
Scoring
Scoring in Maranga is very straightforward. Every letter tile has a face value and the score for any word is equal to the total of its letter values multiplied by the length of the word. The letters of “RAP” have face values of 1, 1, and 3, which add up to 5, so the word has a score of 5 points, times a length of 3, which is 15. Similarly, the word “DIET” is worth 20. So if you played “RAP” and “DIET”, you would score a total of 35 points. But if you organized those same tiles into the single word “PARTIED”, those same letters would be worth 70 points. So the secret to Maranga is in finding longer words.
