Both are turn-based board games, so in some ways they are similar, but in other ways, Chess and Scrabble are quite different. For example, chess is called a game of perfect information because you always know what pieces your opponent has and where he/she can move (even if you suffer from temporary chess blindness sometimes). In Scrabble, though, you don't know what tiles your opponent will have. You don't even know what tiles you will have during a game, so there is quite a bit of luck involved. Scrabble is not a game of perfect information.

In both scrabble and chess, the most valuable peice is the Q.

if you have a Q then U are the most valuable

Both games generally open in the centre.

Yep. I found a book on Scrabble from the late 1950s before QI was an accepted word. If you had a Q, then getting a U was essential back then.

In the earlier days of chess, the queen had different movement abilities, so games change sometimes. 

Both have a world champion.

Congratulations are due for the brave whale

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 Yay theres one in Scotland.  Gan yersel wee man.

Quartz is a good Q word

There are many scrabble words where Q is not followed by U http://www.scrabblefinder.com/scrabble-q-words/  most common of those is qat which is a herbal drug often used in Yemen.

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Qi got added to the Official Scrabble Dictionary only 5 years ago, along with zzz.  But of course the Official Scrabble Dictionary isn't "official" for tournaments in any country.  Official tournaments in the U.S. have used a separate official word list since 1998 when Milton Bradley caved in to pressure and removed 107 legitimate words deemed too naughty for nice people to know.  So the 3rd and 4th editions of the Official Scrabble Dictionary are officially censored.

But qi is legit for the past 5 years, and drawing a "q" in the last couple racks of the game is no longer a disaster anywhere near as often as it used to be.  Same with the "z" now since za was added, also in 2006.

BTW, rumor has it that the censoring crew tasked with making the Official Scrabble dictionary safe for all decent humanity later found employment as forum moderators with a large online chess provider . . . 

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Wow! You sure do keep up on "Scrabble", Cystem! I love Scrabble, but my friends are way better than I. I haven't won a game in almost a year!

One more similarity; it's really easy to cheat when you play online.

I once got a triple word score in chess.

I once mated my opponent in Scrabble.  

It helps if your a cunning linguist.

I just put jism across the board.

And of course one of the greatest similarities between the games (as I was quite amused to find out):

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Probably more than a decade ago I sent SamTimer an email asking which came first, Chronos or the SamTimer.

Never got an answer. I figured they were crooks, being shady scrabblists.