My favourite word games
What makes a great word game?
It’s got to be ‘fun’.
It doesn’t bother with 2 letter words.
It has quick turns.
It has mechanisms more interesting than here is 7 or 8 letters, now think of a word.
So what makes a game ‘fun’? A bit of back and forth between opponents. A few surprises. A chance for some clever plays. Stealing words. Messing with your opponent. That’s why I rate Bali, a card game from 1954. I have an original set. Words are scored as the sum of the numbers on the cards, and only consonants have numbers, times by the length of the word. You make words or word fragments from the letters in front of both you and your opponents, and before you get a chance to score a word you’ve made, your opponents have a chance to steal it. A close runner up is another card game, Royalty (1959). It too has stealing, a slightly more annoying scoring system and is a little bit slower to play than Bali.
Also fun is Sid Sackson’s Buyword (2004) and Letter Tycoon (2015). Each make an economic system attached to your letters. Buyword has some interesting decisions on when to buy letters, and hopefully you can make longer words and sell the letters for more than you bought them. Letter Tycoon lets you buy the rights to letters and then when your opponents use those letters you gain more income. Each is a make a word from so many letters, but both Buyword and Letter Tycoon let you go higher than 8.
I also rate Sid Sackson’s other word games, both Last Word (although it plays extremely slowly. It is good for boring work meetings or long flights) and the games in his 1977 book Beyond Words.
Paperback (2014) was the first of a handful of word making deck-builders, and is the simplest of them. It scratches an itch.
Grapple (1973) was released at the same time as Boggle and Fluster. It is about anagramming words at speed, and is one of the better word games for 3, 4 or 5 players.
Jitters (1986) has one of the worst sounding timer mechanisms of any game in existence, probably in the whole galaxy, and is a dice chucking word game. It is nerver-wracking as you complete patterns with your rolled letters against the clock. Unlike the Word Yahtzees of the world it is a great game. It is a good party game with the limitation that only one player plays at a time.
Wordsy (2017) has an interesting mechanism for thinking of longer words. Again, it is good for the larger player counts. It is a pen and paper game where consonant cards come out and you try to think of words with those consonants in them.
And yes whilst I don’t rate Scrabble highly I will occasionally play it at 2, whilst also watching a movie, but never at 3 or 4. It is just too slow. Of the Scrabble inspired games, such as Upwords, I prefer Nab-It (2010). Definitely avoid any of the maths equation type Scrabble games, such as Equable, but the best game evolved from Scrabble is Qwirkle (2006), which got rid of the boring bit (letters) and kept the fun bit (making plays in interlocking directions).
Of the other word games using cards, Logomachy (1874) which is a fishing game like Scopa is worth a play. Fishing games make a better base to make a word game on than rummy games such as Lexicon (1933), My Word (1980) is about the most interesting game that could be made with only 4 letter words, as opposed to Boogle Slam aka Scrabble Slam which won’t keep you entertained for long.
Bali, Buyword, Paperback, Letter Tycoon, Royalty and Wordsy were on rotation as our lunchtime games at work until Kiitos replaced them all. We still play Last Word in boring meetings.