A sizable contingent of our gaming group likes word games -- Boggle marathons come to mind first and foremost. Because of this it was inevitable that we were going to try BuyWord sooner or later.

It's a very simple game -- everyone gets $200 to start with. The first player rolls a six-sided die (with the number 1 replaced with a "choice") and everyone pulls out that many tiles from the bag. Each tile has a number of dots and the "price" of the lot (you can't just buy some of your tiles!) is the square of all the dots, so if you have six dots worth of tiles, it costs $36.

Now you get the opportunity to make a word and sell it for money. Of course, if you buy $36 worth of tiles and turn around and sell $36 worth of tiles, you're going nowhere fast. This is the interesting part of the game -- the hand/money management. If you buy six dots worth of tiles one turn, and then four dots worth the next turn, you spent $52 to buy them, but perhaps you can sell them as a single ten-dot word for $100. In the end, the person with the most money is the winner.

(As an aside, I really don't like paper money in games, so I think you could use poker chips of just write it all down.)

I don't really like word games, but the money management angle was very interesting. Likewise, my wife enjoys the occasional word game but games like Boggle trip her up because she' trying to make the colossal word when everyone else is doing "cat, can, bag, bat, ban..." so this game is right up her alley. I think there was a lot of backlash against this game at BGG when it won Games Magazine's Game of the Year, but we really enjoy the new twist it puts on the word game genre. (My rating: 7, which I think is the highest I've ever given a word game)