I played two games, on first I died at the last round, even though I was doing longer words and what not, the second game I won even though I was mainly using short words that later I just expanded, like Ick -> Quick or Pic->Picture->Pictures. Some of the letters are just free money, adding 'S' at the end and now we have plural with double the points, add 'Y' at the end and now we have adjective. I guess it's mainly complaining about hte nature of Scrabbles, but these things will eventually impact the way players are playing your game.
I bought a bunch of books, claimed two bounties, got plenty of runes. It's possible to miss the bounty claim, as there's no indication that requirements have been met. I'm pretty sure it happened to me once. Also I wish there's a possibility to buy stuff during the play, not only when finishing a round. The strategy I followed was pretty easy - buy as many books as possible, look at possible word that can have couple of ways to expand and increase both the board tile and a letter tile. I thought that 'Leviathan' book should be OP but it was just adding 50 or so points (they're not multiplied, right?) when my goal is 2500, it's almost worthless later on. Now having three musketeers, Wizard of Oz and those bonuses for horizontal and vertical were acumulating points on their own, I don't even know how. Maybe there's a better way to telegraph how bonuses are being given, flashing book and number-go-up is nice but I felt almost too oblivious to what's happening. That one purple bonus, I don't know what it does? What does it mean he gets triggered again?
I almost got stuck once when I was going for short words. It's pretty easy to run yourself in a corner by mindlessly creating short words. Then you have a discard pile that can be filled almost completely. I think that you can discard almost all tiles without any kind of penalty, until you have that one word winning you a round. I discarded dozen tiles until I got these two missing letters to have a 7 letter word. When round is over discarded tiles are coming back and you can start again. It feels like cheating. Then again on that occasion my turns number went down when discarding a tile. It went from 2 to 1, then to 0, and then I still could discard more and more. I think it happened when I placed one tile on a board and it was good to play, but I decided to remove it and started discarding.
From less technical standpoint, I think your board needs to be a little brighter. Tiles could be a little brighter too. Buttons are pretty plain, adding just a small shading on the edges can help them stand out.
Anyway, I had fun, I wanna jump back in and test diferent ideas.
