Game: Wordsearch

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Toynan — 2007-11-12T23:21:44+00:00

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fenwic — 2007-07-13T15:25:53+00:00

The new dark marble-y board. I like it.

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Kyellan — 2007-06-03T22:37:51+00:00

coffee table game at UCLA's Enigma's Maxicon 2007

Thread: A Challenging, But Leisurely Paced Word Game

cadaverous — 2007-05-17T23:44:19+00:00

I'm not a connoisseur of word games. I've never played Boggle or UpWords and I don't do crossword puzzles, but I have played my share of Scrabble. I even made my own board and tiles out of high-fire ceramic.

Wordsearch's appeal, in my mind, not dissimilar from Scrabble's. It is a simple game to learn, it accommodates 2 to 4 players, and you can easily go from shrink-wrapped to playing in less than 5 minutes.

The game begins with a 10 by 10 grid covered in letter tiles. Only the center 4 spaces are left empty. The game proceeds with each player sliding one or more letters in any one direction to spell a word. The limitation is that every letter you move must be used in the word you spell. The letters used are then removed from the board. The word is then scored by multiplying the sum of the letter values by the length of the word.

As the board opens up and players learn to be clever with the tile maneuvers, the choice of words increases impressively. This does lead to slower turns being played, but not really any more than in a game of Scrabble. A major difference from Scrabble, other than working from the same set of letters as everyone else, is the way you really have to work your over the entire board. The letters can be coming from all ends and getting them where you need them is often a real brain buster .

Any geek who prides one's self on the quality of their vocabulary, solves word puzzles for fun, or plays Scrabble would probably enjoy this game a good bit.

Thread: An outstanding word game

cokasaki — 2007-03-15T18:22:50+00:00

I love word games. Boggle is one of my favorite fast (< 5 minute) games. Balderdash is one of my favorite party games. Jotto is one of my favorite deduction games. What about that grand-daddy of word games, Scrabble? Well, it’s a good game, but I find the culture surrounding the game annoying, particularly its emphasis on memorizing word lists without knowing or caring about the definitions. For years, I’ve been searching for a Scrabble-alternative in the category of mid-length, mid-weight word game for 2-4 players. Wordsearch fills that void wonderfully.

The Twist

Every word game needs a twist to keep it from being a straight vocabulary contest. For example, Scrabble and Word Thief add anagramming. Hangman and Jotto add deduction. Boggle and Keesdrow add searching for words along twisty paths. Traditional word search puzzles, as well as games like WordSpot, involving looking for words written forwards, backwards, up, down, or diagonally. Wordsearch, as the name implies, falls into this last category, but with the additional twist of allowing limited tile movement. It is that tile movement that raises Wordsearch above its many competitors.

The game begins by filling a 10-by-10 grid randomly with letter tiles, leaving the middle four spaces empty. Then players take turns claiming and removing words from the board. Before claiming a word, the player must move one or more tiles. Tiles can be moved any distance in a straight line (including diagonals), but cannot jump over other tiles or land in the same space as another tile. Every tile moved must be used in the claimed word, which can also include some unmoved tiles. However, because at least one tile must be moved, the claimed word cannot consist entirely of unmoved tiles.

For example, given the board shown below
[c] .A........
.....M....
..........
G.........
..........
........E.[/c]
You can make the word GAME by sliding the pieces horizontally, vertically, and diagonally as follows
[c] .A........
....M....
....|....
G--GAME...
.........
........E.[/c]
Of course a real board would also have other letters on it to get in the way.

In the beginning of the game, there are only a few open spaces, so you can’t move tiles very far. But as the game progresses and the board opens up, you can move tiles farther and farther. It is in this mid-game, with plenty of letters still on the board but plenty of open spaces too, where Wordsearch really shines. Every game seems to feature several moves of pure genius, such as a six-letter word assembled from six widely separated areas of the board.

I’d like to shake the hand of the (uncredited) designer of this movement mechanic, which seems to strike a real sweet spot. The static layout of traditional word search puzzles is dull. The ability of words to follow twisty paths, as in Boggle and Keesdrow, is a nice step up, but still allows you to focus to on a strictly local area of the board. The movement mechanic of Wordsearch means you have to pay attention to the entire board, with a sense of satisfaction from a really clever multi-piece move that is reminiscent of a good game of Ricochet Robots.

In fact, Ricochet Robots is a good comparison. In both games, you need to be able to envision the end result of a series of straight line moves involving multiple pieces and long distances without physically manipulating the pieces. (However, Wordsearch does not share the sometimes polarizing simultaneous nature of Ricochet Robots.)

Scoring

One of my personal downfalls at many word games, especially Scrabble, is that I’d always prefer to make an interesting long word than a boring, but high scoring, short word. Many word games offer bonuses for reaching a certain word length, but below that word length you only get incremental increases for each new letter, basically just the points for that new letter. Such games tend to be dominated by the point values of the letters rather than the length of the words.

With that in mind, I was delighted by the scoring system in Wordsearch. For each word, you sum the points for the individual letters (ranging for 0 for common letters to 4 for letters like Q or Z) and then multiply by the length of the word. For example, WIN is worth (3+0+1)*3 = 12 points, while WING is worth (3+0+1+2)*4 = 24 points. Adding a single 2-point letter doubles the score!

The net effect of this scoring system is to strongly encourage longer words. Sure, you’ll still get more points for CWM (7*3 = 21) than for AOLI (0*4 = 0!) but such anomalies are a lot less common in practice than in most word games.

Bits

The components of Wordsearch are adequate, but nothing special (at least in the Pressman edition). The letter tiles themselves are quite nice, printed on solid wooden discs. However, the rest of the components are rather generic. A fairly flimsy box houses the tiles, an ordinary quadfold board, and a single sheet of rules.

Recommendation

If you are a fan of word games, you should certainly give Wordsearch a try. If, like me, you also enjoy making longer words more than shorter words and you find satisfaction in the kinds of spatial reasoning found in Ricochet Robots, then you should bump Wordsearch straight to the top of your want list.

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Friendless — 2007-02-07T00:32:59+00:00

Thread: Re-release?

gattling — 2006-11-07T01:12:50+00:00

Just looked at my brother's Games magazine, and saw this one in the Games 100. Anybody know the expected date of re-release? Before Christmas, perhaps?

My wife is a big-time word game fan, and this would make a splendid gift.

Thanks,
Greg

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fuzzyfife — 2006-02-19T14:13:09+00:00

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DeanMary — 2005-07-07T13:17:01+00:00

Letter Discs

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DeanMary — 2005-07-07T13:16:59+00:00

Empty Board

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Vince Londini — 2005-07-05T18:20:23+00:00

Word Search Game in Progress

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Vince Londini — 2005-07-05T18:20:23+00:00

Waddingtons Word Search Board Closeup

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Vince Londini — 2005-07-05T18:20:22+00:00

Waddingtons Word Search Box - Front and Back

Thread: Our first game of Waddingtons Word Search

Vince Londini — 2005-07-03T02:28:00+00:00

After picking up Word Search (called Wordsearch in the BGG database) for fifty cents at Goodwill this morning, Dad and I sat down to try it out. My set is missing one of the letter tablets (round tiles), but that did not noticably affect the play.

We began by randomly laying out all of the tablets on the board, leaving the four center spaces blank as per the rules and one other space blank because of our missing tablet.

I began the game by sliding an "i" and an "o" into alignment diagonally with a "t" and "r" to spell "trio." The vowels in Word Search are worth zero points, and the common consonants are worth 1 point each. So the tablets for "trio" totaled 2 points, which is then multiplied by the number of letters in the word (in this case 4) for a total score of 8 points.

Dad responded by sliding an "m" into alignment to form "cam," having a point value of 4 for a total value of 12.

I replied by forming "nabs" for a point value of 4, multiplied by 4, to yield 16 points.

Instead of spending hundreds of words of prose to describe the give and take, let me just list our words and scoring:

Dad:
Cam=4x3=12
Dogs=4x4=16
Fib=4x3=12
Lie=1x3=3
Dug=4x3=12
Pun=4x3=12
Vote=4x4=16
Jam=6x3=18
War=4x3=12
Wag=5x3=15
Yes=4x3=12
Sod=2x3=6
Gulp=6x4=24
TOTAL=158

Me:
Trio=2x4=8
Nabs=4x4=16
Went=5x4=20
Scrap=6x5=30
Box=6x3=18
Fruit=5x5=25
Mint=4x4=16
Elf=3x3=9
Hide=4x4=16
Hick=8x4=32
Zone=5x4=20
Load=2x4=8
TOTAL=218

Our observation is that longer words are worth their multiplier factor. My general strategy was to observe which high point tablets seemed free to work with and try to use them, even if it meant a shorter word. However, my words averaged 4 tablets, where Dad's only averaged 3. The combination of high point tablets and slightly longer words made a 60 point difference in our scores.

This can be a real brain burner and tend to analysis paralysis as one tries to see all of the possible moves. It helped to place one's finger on the board at the location where one hopes to slide a letter and then trace diagonally and orthogonally in all directions to see which letter could arrive there.

We liked this game and will likely play again!