OMG Words is what would happen if Balatro and Scrabble had a baby… kind of. It is a roguelike take on Scrabble and since there are so many different things you can do in the game, it often means you don’t have to think of the longest word possible to score maximum points. It can help – but it’s not always essential. Fair warning before diving in though – OMG Words is a tough cookie. Be prepared to battle unfair odds at times if you want to see most of what the game has to offer.
The player starts off with seven letter tiles to make a word to place on the board. The initial rules of Scrabble are followed. The first word must cross the centre board square and from there, any word must intersect a previously laid down word. If letters run against each other as you make a new word, all other words you create must also be real words too. It feels like OMG Words pulls from the US dictionary but I did come across some real words it wouldn’t accept. Each letter has a points score and for each word you make or alter those points add up. So far so Scrabble – now let’s dive into the roguelike elements.
Each game of OMG Words has ten rounds to survive, with each asking you to score a certain amount of points for a bronze, silver or gold pass. Fail to meet the bronze requirement or the final level score threshold and it is game over. You only have a few turns to reach that limit and if you don’t like the letters you’ve got, you have some discards you can use each round too. Both turns and discards are things you can buy more of between each round if luck swings your way in the upgrade store, but I’ll explain that later. Letters can score more points by being placed on blue arrow-up squares a bit like the double or triple letter squares in Scrabble. Alongside the points for each letter you place down, there is a score multiplier. These are pink electric squares that add multipliers to your score. Those are helpful but powerful enough on their own and here’s where relics and boons come in.
A player can buy and equip up to 5 relics and 2 boons (unless you buy upgrade slots) to take into battle. Relics are passive abilities that are often related to your multiplier or letter score. This could mean that letters from S-Z now score double, or five letter words carry a 5 times multiplier. There are lots of variations and many relics belong to collections that if you equip them all will make them more powerful. Some also come with additional cash generation, helpful for buying relics to begin with. Boons, on the other hand, change letter tiles and the board. You can add additional score or multiplier squares or other board square types, such as forcing you to make words that write in a certain direction. They can also paint your letter tiles, meaning that when you play that tile, you might get a bonus letter score or multiplier. You can buy relics and boons between rounds in the shop, alongside some permanent upgrades for the run, such as reducing shop prices or getting additional relic and boon slots. That money largely comes from if you scored a bronze, silver or gold pass in the previous round.
What OMG Words forces you to do is look at your overall set-up and then create words that fit the style you need to play. Yes, long words usually make more points, but not always. You could have relics that force you to think of certain word lengths or to use certain letters more than others because of the bonuses that they bring. For this reason alone, I threw my “don’t use a dictionary” rule out the window. I abused Scrabble word finder tools to find optimum approaches for scoring OMG Words style – not Scrabble style. It kind of paid off, but the thresholds in OMG Words are brutal – especially the final round where you need to score a huge bucket of points to win as there is no silver or bronze cut-off.
This brings me to my main critique of OMG Words. It is trying to do so much in a very short space of playtime that it doesn’t flow quite as naturally as I’d like. Each round lasts four turns (words) initially, so if you get one bit wrong, it’s curtains. Using boons alters the board yet the placements are random and often at points on the board you’ll never reach in four turns. Relics cost a lot. Once you’ve bought a relic you don’t usually let go of it unless something really good comes along. OMG Words is so focused on being brutal that it suffocates some of the fantastic creativity that has gone into making the game. I’d have liked rounds to be longer so that all the upgrades and choices you make feel like they matter for longer too.
All I’ve described here is the first level and the fact less than 30% of players have beaten it and less than 15% have cleared the next level shows how hard it is. That is a shame because, beyond the initial level, OMG Words has lots to offer. As you crank up the difficulty, blocker tiles are added to the board. This stops you from having free reign to put whatever word length you want anywhere and you have to work around forks in the road. Linguistic mode adds multi-letter tiles such ‘ing’ or ‘ll’ or ‘th’. Suddenly, bigger words are available to make but now it’s far trickier to link words up. I haven’t even mentioned the fact each run has three bosses randomly selected from a pool of bosses to beat on each playthrough too. Some are easier to cope with like banning two letter words. Others force you to empty your letter tiles after each turn and that can be a nightmare. Equally taxing are pointless vowels as you’ll be impacted constantly each turn. It is all part of the challenge but it is very daunting to tackle.
If that complexity and mountainous difficulty haven’t put you off – get this game. At times, I was hate-playing OMG Words because I was so determined to beat a run. On reflection, that means it has that addictive “just one more go” appeal even if it was a bit toxic at times! OMG Words has plenty of great ideas. Whilst I wished the game gave them more space to grow and flourish, the developer has been updating the game and each update has improved it and made elements of it a bit more accessible to a new player. This is a fiendish word game that I recommend to the non-casual crowd. If you enjoyed Balatro – you’ll likely enjoy OMG Words to some extent too.
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