Four clue words on four leaves. Can your teammates use these clues to select and arrange four square donut-shaped cards so their keywords line up?
So Clover is a cooperative word association game. Talk it through and look for a common thread. It will take more than luck to make the right connections.
Tune in to explore the game and learn why we think it is chock full of Major Fun!
Designer: Bill Eberle, Greg Olotka, Peter Olotka Artist: Kwanchai Moriya Publisher: Heidelbär Games 2-4 players 30 minutes ages 10+ MSRP $30 Time to teach & learn: 3 minutes
Decipher is a clever but simple call and response word guessing game. Using your powers of deduction and construction, can you build a word from small letter fragments offered up by a puzzle Maker each round? Decipher the clues the quickest and you’ll score well. Stump the players with a tricky word and you’ll rake in the points.
Decipher is the second game in the Letter Piece series from German publisher Heidelbär Games. Each game in the series features 4 brightly colored plastic letter pieces. The pieces fall in to two categories – sticks and curves. There’s a long red stick and a short yellow stick. There’s a wide blue curve and a tight green curve (a U-shape).
Along with these pieces is a construction template showing how each letter in the alphabet can be built using these four shapes. The letter R, for instance, is made using a red stick, a yellow stick and a green curve.
In addition to these letter pieces, there are letter tiles A-Z, one letter per tile. Each tile depicts a letter using its proper construction layout.
These word tiles will be placed in to a Word Rack, a sort of cardboard wallet that can be folded and flipped over. More on this later.
There are tokens for guessing, and scoring bonuses, “No” tokens for the Puzzle Maker, plus a large game board / screen and a score pad.
The most notable and amazing component in Decipher, though, is the box insert. For such a simple game, Decipher has one of the most elaborate game box inserts I have ever seen!
The game is played using the box. There are special areas for each letter piece, larger ones for the letter tiles, and a space for the puzzle Maker’s NO tokens.
The insert serves two functions. It has a slot for the cardboard screen so the puzzle Maker can select a mystery word for the round and collect the needed tiles and letter pieces.
Once selected, the screen lays flat across the storage compartments and becomes the game board. There are separate spaces cleared marked on the board where each letter of the word will be built as you play. Last but not least, the insert as a special angled area for the Word Rack which will face the Puzzle Maker.
Each round in Decipher one player will be the Puzzle Maker and the rest of the players serve as Word Seekers. The Puzzle Maker comes up with a mystery word. Word Seekers will have opportunities to guess the word as each letter in the word is built piece by piece on the board. After each player has played as the Puzzle Maker, the player with the most points wins the game.
A brief word about the Word Rack.
The Word Rack is a simple but ingenious gizmo that helps facilitate the game. The Puzzle Maker selects a word and spells it out placing the correct letter tiles into the word rack. Once selected, the word rack is folded up and closed like a wallet, flipped over and then placed into its special cubby hole in the box insert.
This makes the Word Rack visible only to the Puzzle Maker and the mystery word is now lined up with the spaces marked out on the game board.
Here’s why this is both important and cool.
Each turn, the Puzzle Maker will offer a single letter piece to one Word Seeker. The Word Seeker will then take a guess as to where this letter piece belongs in the word by placing the letter piece on a space on the board. The Puzzle Maker will respond YES or NO. Yes meaning, the piece belongs in that space and is part of a letter ; no meaning it isn’t.
The Word Rack is a constant and important visual reminder of what letter pieces go with each space on the board. With the mystery word, lined up in its shielded cubby hole, the Puzzle Maker can respond quickly and confidently as each Word Seeker makes a guess.
If the Word Seeker is correct on the first guess, huzzah for the Seekers! You now have some information about what that letter could be. If the first guess receives a NO from the Puzzle Maker, that space on the board will receive a NO token which will cover that shape letter piece on that space on the board and the Seeker must guess again. Eventually, the letter piece will find a home on the board since the Puzzle Maker may only give you pieces that are part of the word. The goal for Seekers is to place pieces with as few NOs as possible since each NO will give the Puzzle Maker points at the end of the round.
As the game progresses more of the mystery word will appear on the board and Seekers may want to solve the puzzle and guess the word. Each Seeker may make only three guesses to solve the puzzle each round. If you solve the puzzle and guess the mystery word, wahoo! The round ends and we move on to scoring. If you are incorrect, the Puzzle Maker will take one of your guess tokens and score it at the end of the round.
If the word is a tricky one and only three letter pieces remain in the Puzzle Maker’s supply, we move into Bonus Mode for the round. With so much information available to the Seekers, each turn becomes a little more deliberate. The Word Seeker who is up must ask the Puzzle Maker for a letter piece. In doing so, the Puzzle Maker will receive a bonus token for extra points at the end of the round. Why so deliberate? Forcing the Seeker to ask for a piece allows players to make guesses at the mystery word before handing bonus points to the Puzzle Maker.
Eventually the round will end with one Seeker guessing correctly or all Seekers running out of guesses.
If a Seeker guesses correctly, they collect the Decipher token for 5 points plus 2 points for each left over Bonus token. The Puzzle Maker receives the Decipher token for 5 points if no one guesses the word. The Puzzle Maker also scores 1 point for each NO token on the board, 1 point for each guess token collected, and 2 points for any bonus tokens. Word Seekers who did not guess the word can also score a few points – one point for each unused guess token.
A new round begins with another player becoming the Puzzle Maker. When all players have had a turn as Puzzle Maker, tally the final score and the player with the most points wins!
Decipher is the spiritual successor to parlor game classics like Hangman / Wheel of Fortune. In adding deductive and semi-cooperative elements, Decipher reinvents these timeworn classics for a modern audience.
It might not be obvious at first, but as the game progresses, the Seekers can begin to make important deductions about each letter in the word as the Puzzle Maker places NO tokens on the board (not unlike another classic – Mastermind). Because each letter must be built using a specific set of pieces, even a single NO begins to eliminate some letters from contention altogether. Likewise, when a letter piece eventually finds its home on the board, Seekers can begin to narrow down possible letters based on a single shape.
If the Puzzle Maker hands you a wide blue curve piece, for instance, you know that it must be part of a C, D, G, O or Q since these are the only letters in the game that use that specific letter piece!
As the Puzzle Maker, the challenge is to dole out the pieces in such a way that will keep the range of letters as open as possible. This will generate more NO tokens and possibly allow you to reach bonus mode for the round.
While there is an individual winner, teamwork among Seekers can help insure the Puzzle Maker never gets to the bonus round. This tacit nudge toward cooperation makes the game feel like a communal effort. It also makes the game more accessible to players who might normally be intimidated by word games. Even though one Seeker may net the big points for a round, most likely there will be a cheer amongst the Seekers when the word is revealed.
In Hangman, pressure in the game is provided by time. Only so many turns before the poor stick figure meets an unfortunate end. In Wheel of Fortune, pressure in the game is provided by the other players. Someone more clever (or more fortunate) might line up the letters before you.
Decipher combines both these elements into a single experience while adding a third source of pressure – the Puzzle Maker! It is not a guarantee the Seekers will solve every word, but it is very likely, given that all the letter pieces will eventually be revealed. The added challenge to each round in Decipher is to solve the puzzle quickly because the Puzzle Maker stands to gain in many different ways the longer it takes to discover the word.
Simple in concept. Elegant as an object of play. Adaptable to the needs of different players. Puzzle Makers can create longer words for experienced wordsmiths or shorter words for neophytes. Have a large group? Play in teams. Put simply, Decipher is built for Major Fun.
Designer: Bill Eberle, Peter Olotka, Greg Olotka Publisher: HeidelBÄR Games 1-4 players 20-30 minutes ages 10+ MSRP $30 Time to teach & learn: 5 minutes
Writers have talent – stringing words together, making them sing. But Wordsmiths? Their skills are more rare and special. They build each letter in every word from the ground up, one piece at a time.
From an assortment of basic shapes, can you assemble letters from a template and then use those letters to build words? Be quick and dig deep into your vocabulary to score big. Wordsmith gives new meaning to word play!
Wordsmith comes with 120 colorful plastic letter pieces. These are the literal building blocks you will use to create your words. They are divided into four types: long sticks are red, short sticks are yellow, half circles are blue and mini-Us are green.
There are four dice with sides matching the colors of the pieces and a scorepad.
Wordsmith uses the game box in fun and interesting ways. Instead of a game board, there is a plastic insert with sections for each letter piece and a resting area for each die. Even the sides of the game box are crucial to the game as each side contains an A-Z construction blueprint, so every player has a reference to consult.
The goal in Wordsmith is to assemble the pieces you have available into letters and then use those letters to form words. Each round, you will be asked to build six words, then score. After three rounds, the player with the highest score wins.
When building, everyone works from a common set of blueprints. Want to build an E? You’ll need one red long stick and three yellow short sticks. Need an R? Put together one green mini-U, a red long stick and a yellow short stick. Every letter you make must conform to these construction guidelines.
Dice are used to determine the starting set of pieces held in common by all players. Roll each die twice to generate a pool of 8 letter pieces.
Once everyone has their initial pieces, play is freeform. Ready, set, go!
Once the game begins, however, you can add pieces to your supply by rolling your die. At any point, you may roll it and add a piece to your supply that matches the face you rolled. Note: the star face is wild and any piece may be taken.
When you have assembled a word, call it out and show it to all. Others will quickly check your work. If it is spelled correctly and is a valid word, wahoo! Write it on your scorepad. Unlike many word games, limited punctuation is allowed. The yellow short sticks can serve as apostrophes or hyphens.
Any leftover pieces you didn’t use are discarded back to the box and you must fill in a space on your scorepad for every piece discarded. This makes Wordsmith a puzzle game, a word game, AND an efficiency game!
Sure, you can roll the die to amass a huge stockpile of pieces, BUT there could be dangerous consequences to that decision. The first six pieces you discard won’t hurt you. But after that, every piece discarded will cost you one point when scoring.
Continue building words from your supply of pieces until one player reaches six words. Score one point per letter in each word you build. You also score one point for each unmarked discard space.
Begin the next round with a new set of common pieces and build away!
Flexibility sets Wordsmith apart. The base game described above is wonderful, challenging, quick, and fun. Included with the rules are several variants that are every bit as good and allow the game to adapt to the experience level or play style of many different groups.
You can play silently, where no one calls out their words. At the end of the round, scoresheets are checked and illegal words won’t count. This makes the game less raucous and more thoughtful.
You can play without time pressure, allowing players to claim and complete all six words each round. This encourages longer words and higher scores.
You can play with a variable set of letter pieces for each player.
You can add a special 6-letter word for each round and spell this word out vertically along your scorepad so one letter lines up with each row. The word you build for that row must contain that specific letter in order to score.
And the list goes on!
Wordsmith practically begs for your own variations. Here are some we’ve had fun with:
each word built must fit a certain theme
each player gets a limited number of dice rolls
your next word must begin with the last letter of the prior word
Wordsmith wants you to play with it. It entices you to explore the basic system of rules and see them as building blocks, just like the letter pieces!
Wordsmith is an extremely clever mash up of spatial puzzle, time pressure, and classic word game. It comes to us from the team who also designed Cosmic Encounter, Dune, and Hoax in the 1980s. These games were groundbreaking then and have influenced several generations of designers since. It’s no exaggeration to say their imagination and innovation laid the groundwork for the board game renaissance we all enjoy today. It’s wonderful and encouraging to see this team is at it again, breathing life and energy into the word game genre.
You don’t have to be an English major to love Wordsmith. It’s as much a game to challenge your quick handed assembly skills as your vocabulary. And if you hit a roadblock with one version of the game, there are many paths to Major Fun to find instead.
Your team of spies intercepts a secret transmission… 3 words… a code tied to a sequence of numbers. There it is again! Another transmission, but this time with 3 new words.
Can you decipher these words into the proper sequence when the pressure is on? Remember, the other team is listening and trying to unravel your words and your seuqence at the same time!
Decrypto is a wonderful call-and-response party game where the challenge is to come up with clues that are just enough left of center to keep the other team from connecting the dots AND not so crazy that you fool your own team in the process.
The more clues you give, the harder this becomes and the more laughs you’ll have. And that’s a sequence that spells Major Fun!
Publisher: Johnny Landers P: Candygrams LLC
2-4 players 15-20 min. ages 7+ MSRP $25
Candygrams is a colorful crossword game that offers some fun and challenging twists to a traditional word game. Use letter tiles to create (and recreate) your own grid of words to win the game.
Candygrams comes with 111 really nice letter tiles. Each tile has a nice thickness and heft and is screen printed in one of three bright colors: pink, yellow and blue.
The game also comes with two large six sided dice. These dice have colored faces that match the colors of the tiles: 2 yellow, 2 pink and a 2 blue sides.
To play, mix up the tiles face down and each player draws 25 tiles to his or her hand (called the candy shop). Set 10 extra tiles face up in the middle. This is the Candy Jar. Now we’re ready to begin!
Well, almost ready! The first thing each player will do is create a starting word for his or her own personal crossword layout. Over the course of the game, you’ll build from the base word up and down and across to form new words with new tiles. You will create your own personal free-form board.
The only rule with this starting word? It has to contain at least one of each different color tile.
Once everyone has a base word, the first round begins with someone rolling the dice.
Once the dice are rolled everyone plays together using the result of the dice. The colors rolled on the dice tell you which dice can be used to make words this round. If I roll pink and blue, this means those are the only color letters I can use. Yellow has to sit this one out.
This color rule applies to the letters you build off of on your crossword board. Using the example above, you have to build your new word off a blue or pink letter. You can add onto an existing word, branch off in a new direction, even create multiple words as long as all the tiles are played in a single line horizontally or vertically. But in each case this pesky color rule still applies.
The goal of the game is to play all 25 tiles first, so the longer the word you build each turn, the closer you are to victory. No scoring, no points. Just get all the tiles from your candy shop to your board.
The color restrictions provided by the dice deserve some real love here. Instead of one rack of letter tiles, you really have Six different racks of tiles depending on how the dice come up. Blue – Pink, Blue- Yellow, Yellow – Pink involved two colors BUT it is also possible to roll doubles! So you may have a turn where you can only play just blue, pink or yellow!
On one hand, this may severely limit your options, depending on the mix of tiles in your candy shop. BUT whenever doubles are rolled, you can swap one tile from your hand with a tile in the Candy Jar. This means, as the dice come up with doubles you can slowly shift your hand away from troublesome letters
As the game moves on, you may find a great word (or words) that use a ton of tiles but if the color dice dont cooperate, you may have to bide your time and hold onto those letters, hoping the right roll will come next round. A different kind of randomness. Not the randomness of drawing a bad rack of tiles. But randomness that requires patience and planning. You dont know how the dice will come up, so there’s an element of hand management in play throughout the game.If you do not try to keep a bit of balance in your candy shop, you may find yourself with a a mix of tiles you know wont blend together. If you dont take this into account, you’ll find yourself with a mix of tiles that wont blend together nicely into words and have to pass, waiting for doubles so you can swap out a tile.
It’s not just what tiles you play but when you play them that matters!
Even where you play them matters! And this is what really sets Candygrams apart.
When you go to form your word each round, you have access to any tiles already on the board and played to your layout provided that removing them from the layout doesnt split the board and that all the words in your crossword are, well, still words! You cant take a tile and leave a string of gibberish!
This means that if you are clever about WHERE you play your tiles to the board, you still have access to them on later rounds. Using prefixes or suffixes that can be peeled off and have a word remain valid may give you many more options. And the number of options you keep open comes down to how cleverly you can build your words and your board.
Here, I used the S from tonics (above) later in the game to make the word suds (below). Since tonic (singular) is still a valid word, I can peel off the S and use it again.
Using dice to create a new challenge each round and allowing players to use tiles already in play make decisions in Candygrams fun and different than most other word games.
Whenever we begin a discussion about word games, we have to address the 800 pound gorilla in the room: Scrabble. Since 1937, it has dominated and continues to dominate the market. And for good reason. It’s an excellent game! That said, it has so thoroughly dominated the landscape and for such a long time, it is almost impossible to imagine a word game that isn’t built from a foundation that starts with Scrabble. Can you think of many words games today that you wouldnt start by saying “It’s like Scrabble, but….?” It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy! I’m no Scrabble hater at all but its success has has a collective effect on how we imagine word games. Scrabble has provided the boundaries and that means we end up with a LOT of games that are just way too similar to the original.
Enter Candygrams. Yes, you can definitely see it has a Scrabblicious foundation. BUT let’s try the exercise I suggested above.
It’s like Scrabble…
but you have dice
and the dice tell you what tiles you can use
and the dice tell you when you can swap tiles
and you build words on your own board
and you can use tiles already played to the board
and you ‘re not playing for points
So, it’s not one difference. It’s many! This is no tweak. It may have started in the Scrabble chorus, but Candygrams has a clear voice – a voice that stands out from the crowd.
The last thing I want is for my praise of these subtleties to make Candygrams seem too complex. It’s truest strength lies in its simplicity.
The game really is roll dice, build words from the colors rolled. Use all your tiles to win and reuse tiles already played, if you’re clever.
Young players can play on one level and word nerds can appreciate it on another. But the magic is both groups could enjoy playing together
That makes Candygrams a delight and most surely a delicious helping of Major Fun!
Designer: Gil Hova
Publisher: Formal Ferret Games
1-6 players 20 min. ages 10+ MSRP $25
In Wordsy, players use a grid of letter cards to form a word each round. Some letters are worth more, others less. If you’re quick, you could score a nice bonus but only if your word scores more than the others. At the end of 7 rounds, the player with the most points wins the game.
Wordsy comes with a deck of 76 letter cards. 60 of the letters are common. 16 letters are rare. The rare letters have a golden color and icons showing the bonus points they score.
There are also 4 column cards that will determine the point value for letters during the game (5-4-3-2).
The game also comes with a scorepad, a sandtimer and pencils. There’s also a no-flip card and a card used in solo play.
Each round, a grid of 8 letter cards will be dealt to the table. The letters will be separated into four columns and a point card will be assigned to each column. The leftmost column is worth five points, the next 4 points, 3 points, and 2 points.
There can never be more than two of the same letter in the grid and there can never be more than 2 rare letters in the grid. When everyone is ready, the round begins and the goal is to form a word using the letters in the grid.
If the two letters in the 5 point column are T and L, then you’ll have a lot of incentive to use those letters. If your word has a T and an L you’ll get 5 points for each.
If the 3 point column has a B and and H, you’ll get 3 points for a B in your word. Since H is considered a rare letter you get a bonus point, the H is worth 4. So if my word was THIMBLE I’d score 17 points.
You can use the letters in any order and the word you make can be any length (the longer, the better). No peeking at other people’s words!
Each player will have a sheet from the score pad and will write down a single word for the round.
The first person to finish will put the other players on the clock by flipping the 30 second sandtimer. You must have a word written on your sheet by the time the sand runs out.
When the round ends, each player will read their word aloud and announce his or her score. If you were the fastest player to find a word AND your word scored more points than most or all others (depending on the number of players) you get a bonus. If you were not the fastest but your word scored more points, you get a bonus. These bonuses increase in later rounds.
Between rounds, the mix of letters in the grid shifts. The four cards in the lower point columns (3 and 2) are discarded and the cards columns 4 and 5 slide down. Four new cards are then added to the grid in the high point columns.
It’s lather, rinse and repeat for six more rounds.
The fastest player from the prior round takes the no-flip card, meaning he or she cannot flip the timer in the next round. This means someone different is guaranteed to be the fastest player each round.
At the end of the game you get rid of the two lowest scoring words and add your points, including any bonuses. Highest point total wins the game.
To this point, Wordsy follows some pretty standard conventions we have come to know and love when playing word games.
It has some Boggle in its DNA. There’s a random grouping of letters each round BUT….
Instead of a grid of letter dice we have a grid of letter cards AND all the letters in Wordsy are not created equal. Some letters are clearly more important than others based on their position in the grid. This makes you look at the letter grid in a way that’s fresh and different, prioritizing letters in high point columns or rare letters with bonus points.
Wordsy is a Scrabble cousin, too. The goal each turn is to come up with the best scoring word you can given the options available BUT here’s the big one…
You can use any letters you want to make your word, even letters that are not part of the grid!
This changes everything. You can add as many non-scoring letters as you need to get to a word that uses the juicy scoring ones. Unlike Boggle, you can’t complain about a weird gibberish jumble of letter cubes turning up. Unlike Scrabble, you can’t complain that your rack of letter tiles resembles the mating call of some angry monkey because it’s all vowels.
Suddenly the grid of letters on the table is not a limitation; it’s an opportunity. Wordsy challenges you to be creative, the game wants you to play with letters and words to find one that fits well with the scoring rules you are presented with each round.
This means the variety of words found each round will most often be wildly different, since players have so much freedom to find them.
That moment of discovery each round is what makes Wordsy special and different and fun. You arent just rearranging fixed letters like a puzzle to find the best fit. The game asks you to add your own imagination to find the right combination of letters that ARE NOT THERE. You’re more invested in every word you find because you had to add something to find it.
Wordsy is familiar but fresh. It is easy to teach and learn. It encourages creative thinking. And it will not wear out its welcome over time since each new grid of letters provides a new challenge.
This makes Wordsy a modern classic. The fun it offers is evergreen and can grow with players over a lifetime of games. It also makes Wordsy a Keeper, the highest honor any Major Fun game can achieve. If you are a fan of word games, make room on your shelf for Wordsy. I’m confident it will stand the test of time.
One teammate provides clues in the form of word cards on a rack.
Can your team guess the target word first?
Now this might sound like many other party games BUT… Word Slam does something different. Something noteworthy. Something ridiculously simple and ridiculously fun.
Word Slam forces each team to use a fixed set of words as clues.
The challenge and the joy in the game comes from the very clever omissions from the decks of words you use as clues. The word you want is never there, so the game pushes you to be creative with the words provided. To find freedom inside the limitations imposed.
This simple twist – limiting the language you can use to communicate with your team makes Word Slam both frustrating and fun, because, in a very real way, the fun comes from the frustration.
Listen in to learn more about the game and why we think it is unequivocally Major Fun!
Designer: Alvin Sanico Graphic Design: Alvin Sanico, Michael Graham, Scott Kim Publisher: INversion Games 1-6 players 10-20 min. ages 10+ MSRP $9.99
Double Play is a set of word games a fun twist, literally. Every letter card in the deck is actually two different letters, depending on the direction you play the card!
Double Play is a deck of Versatileletter cards. What the heck is a Versatileletter, you ask ? It’s a specially designed font that represents two different letters, depending on the orientation of the card.
That means an upside down t can be an f. A d can be a p.
An h can be a y. Or an s can be a v.
Like Scrabble, each letter is assigned a value. But because each card is two letters, the value of the card also changes based on how you play it.
Every card back contains the entire alphabet, so if when you’re learning to decipher the letters, you always have a guide handy
There are four games included in Double Play:
Finders Stealers: A race to find the longest word from face up letters on the table (2 per player).
Solitaire Dare: Just like it sounds, lay out letter cards in columns and try to form words to play every card in each column.
The Final Word: A 2 player game where players take turns playing cards from a common hand, but only the last word played each round will score.
These first three games can be interesting and fun but the fourth game, Word Wars 1-2-3, is the reason Double Play is Major Fun.
There are 3 rounds in Word Wars 1-2-3. Each round you get a hand of 10 cards.
Your job is to form 3 words using all 10 cards. You’re looking for the three highest scoring words you can find.
Pro tip: you may want some scratch paper handy for each player to write out various words you find and the score for each word! I’d also recommend setting a timer (5 minutes to start; once you’re comfortable, reduce the time to 3 minutes a round).
Once each player has found his or her three words, you’ll compare your results.
I dealt myself a hand of 10, set the timer for 3 minutes.
Here’s your hand. See if you can beat me!
Here’s what I came up with. la (3) cuff (12) yuck (15)
First, compare Word 1, your lowest scoring word. The player with the higher value, scores 1 point.
Next, compare Word 2, the middle scoring word. The player with the higher value scores 2 points.
Finally, compare Word 3, your highest scoring word. The player with the higher value scores 3 pts.
If you make a clean sweep in a round you get a bonus of 4 extra points.
After 3 rounds of play, the player with the highest score wins!
The innovative graphic design in Double Play is the heart and soul of the game. Without this fun twist, it would be like a thousand other word games under the sun. But this letter system will turn some of your assumptions about word games on their heads.
Unlike a traditional word game, Double Play avoids the bad mix of letters problem that has plagued many a Scrabble player through the decades. You don’t have to raise your fist and curse the spelling gods for giving you a hand that spells A-E-I-I-O-O-U because in Double Play that hand would also be
E-A-L-L-C-C-N. The dreaded Q-W-G-C-H-L-T is also P-M-K-O-Y-I-F. Or ANY combination of the two sets of letters! You may not find a 10 letter word in every hand or every round you play, but there is an amazing variety available in every hand. It’s up to you to find it!
Word Wars 1-2-3 takes full advantage of this variety and gives each player a fun word puzzle to solve each round. Especially if you add in a little time pressure, once you are familiar with the letter system, you’ll see how the deck and the rules connect to give you the sense that there’s always a better word just waiting to be discovered.
The designer of Double Play offers up a creative set of cards and a clever set of games but perhaps best of all, the designer encourages players to use the cards to find other ways to play. The wacky letter cards certainly entice you to try classic word games (try a crossword style game, building the board with cards) or even tweak the games they provide.
After a few games of Word Wars 1-2-3, we found it was even more fun to make each of our 3 words using the entire hand of 10 cards for all three words. This encourages finding longer and higher scoring words and can result in even more fun discoveries hidden in your hand.
Using the same hand above and three minutes, here are the 3 words I found with the Major Fun variant.
Knot (10) yuck (15) toughen (15)
See how you do using the same hand, using all 10 letters to form three words.
Double Play encourages players to be playful with the game itself. You can use the cards to find new ways to have fun. That’s a concept that’s woven into the fabric of Major Fun.
For its value, versatility and fun, any lover of word games will find lots of reasons to love Double Play.
And if traditional word games have left you frustrated, Double Play’s new twist gives you plenty of reasons to give it a try.
Anaxi is a party game. Anaxi is a word game. In fact, it’s both. Because Anaxi lives in the overlapping area between these two types of games.
In practice, Anaxi celebrates the venerable Venn diagram by making the diagrams into engines for fun. Using circular see-through word cards, players construct a mini-Venn diagram and then each player races to write down words that fit within each overlapping area of the cards. The player with the highest score after five rounds wins the game.
Anaxi is a card game but the cards are not typical in any way. There are 75 word cards in the deck. They are circular (3.5” in diameter), made of flexible plastic and half of each card is transparent. The deck is split into three colors: 25 blue, 25 red and 25 orange cards.
Within the colored section of each card is a single word – an adjective. These adjectives run the gamut from square to spicy or fluffy to damp.
There are also two base cards (an extra in case you lose one). You’ll build the Venn diagram on top of this base card when each game round begins.
There’s a 1-minute sand timer included and an answer pad.
Setup for the game is really simple. Separate the deck into three 25 card decks by color. Place the base card centrally located where everyone can see it and make sure everyone has a sheet from the answer pad and a pen or pencil. Now you’re ready to play Anaxi!
There are five rounds in the game. Each round a dealer selects one card from each of the three decks and places them around the base card. The base card has colored and numbered areas so you can see how and where to line up the three cards. The basic idea is that the see through area of the card will face inward toward the base card, allowing players to see how the three word cards overlap. There are four overlapping areas. One area between each word and one combined area where all three words overlap together in the middle.
Here’s an example layout: Round – Cold – Sweet
Once the cards are in place, the dealer will turn over the sand timer and the round begins!
Each player looks at the four overlapping areas on the base card. Can you think of something that is round and sweet? Then write those words in column 3 on your sheet. Can you think of things that are cold and round? Write those in column 1. How about cold sweet? Column 2 for those. Last of all, what about things that are all three: round, cold and sweet? All those answers go in column 4.
Once the timer runs out, players score points for each answer on their sheets that is unique and fits the words. Columns 1-3 score 1 point for each unique answer. Column 4, the answer that combines all three word, scores 3 points per unique answer.
After round one, it’s lather, rinse and repeat. Three new words, flip the timer and go! The player with the highest score after five rounds wins the game.
Sometimes games that rely on creativity can fall flat because they don’t offer enough inspiration or choices. Especially when placed under time pressure, players can freeze up or just give up because they feel frustrated.
That’s pretty much the opposite of fun.
Not so with Anaxi. There are four different ways you can see the words each round and that means you have lots of fuel for inspiration and imagination each round.
The timer does go fast, so you shouldn’t expect to write a novel’s worth of answers under each column but you’ll be surprised how some words connect immediately and others leave you scratching your head. Try it. Set a timer and give the three words from the example above a go. Don’t peek below at my answers! (listed at the bottom of the review)
How did you do?
Anaxi also encourages and awards creativity and imaginative answers. You are not limited to one word or simple answers to fit the words. For Column 4 in the earlier example (things that are cold, round and sweet) I could have written: a frozen ice cream cake for my cat’s 9th birthday. Major Fun games can and should put you in this playful mindset and Anaxi excels in this regard.
Major Fun games are also flexible enough to allow variants or adjustments. We found it fun to let the dealer select the word cards rather than from a random draw from each deck. Chance can produce some fun results, but it was equally fun to see what crazy combinations each player came up with.
Even though Anaxi is a light hearted game suitable for parties and word-nerds alike, the inspiration for the game comes from several philosophers.
The most obvious is John Venn whose diagrams gave visual form to overlapping ideas.
The less obvious connection reaches back to ancient Greece. Anaxi owes its name to the Greek philosopher Anaximander, the father of Cosmology. He wrote about the boundless material of the universe being transformed into all the aspects of the world around us and then returning to this primordial form. How does this relate? Each round, players take basic words and combine them into new forms. The cards return to the decks and can take totally new definitions each round of the game.
You certainly don’t need to know any of these details to have fun with Anaxi but I am glad they took the time to include it.
My one and only quibble with the game is the lack of credit for the game design. Every game has a designer even if the game was developed in-house by the fine folks at Funnybone Toys. Credit should be given where it is due and it is a shame this information is still not standard among all publishers.
But let’s not stray too far from the mark here.
Anaxi is a fast fun mash-up of word and party game genres. It’s enjoyable by players young and old and certainly overlaps with the two words that matter most to us: Major Fun.
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Here’s what I came up with for the example listed above:
