Harigana

Harigana is a tile-laying word game for Japanese for 2 or more players. Tiles have hiragana syllable symbols rather than letters. The game is similar to Scrabble, but has some differences in the scoring system and some other differences to accommodate the Japanese language and the hiragana writing system.

The game was designed with Japanese language learners in mind, but can be played by Japanese speakers just as well. Japanese language learners should not hesitate to use a dictionary to help find words, and are advised to use an optional rule that awards bonus points if they can write kanji versions of words correctly (without looking them up, of course).