If you ever wondered what Boggle would play like if it were a roguelike game, then Word Play is the game to answer that question for you. The second release from the Gamemakers Toolkit, Word Play is a clean, layered, time-limit-free word game that lets you switch up the rules with perks and upgrades, just as much as it changes the rules itself from round to round. Just beware – you’ll need a thesaurus to survive it!
Each run in Word Play starts out with a board of 16 letter tiles selected from a giant bag of letter tiles. You’ll be asked to make words that are at least four letters long, placing them on the scoring board at the top of the screen. Just like Scrabble or Boggle, each letter has its own point score. In Word Play, each letter placement after the fourth letter earns bonus points, too. This incentivises finding the longest words possible, at least early on. Each round asks the player to score a certain number of points before running out of turns. You’ll have limited shuffles to get new letters, and because whatever letters you don’t use remain on your board for the next word, you are best leaving shuffles for when you’ve got a board full of J, Z, Y, X, Q, and in my case, about seven I’s.
Reach the score threshold and you’ll move to the next round, but not before you are offered the choice of one of three randomly selected items. Perks are modifiers, and they are the biggest thing to consider, as they change global rules. They range from triple scoring a word if it ends with a vowel to adding a 17th, 18th, or 19th letter slot onto the board. Perks stack, so your choices can really boost a shorter word to become a very powerful word, even more so than a word two or three letters longer. Upgrades affect specific tiles, often changing their own letter score, or colouring them so they become a multiplier. These often sound stronger than they appear to be in practice, but can also stack well if you choose to upgrade multiple vowels, or specific letters you intend to repeatedly use. The last item type is a gift. These are usually new tiles like a QU or ING, which can be very handy in a bind.
Word Play has no time limits, so you can consider every option before making it, and you’ll need to. The first few rounds have low score thresholds to beat, but they ramp up in the second half quickly. This coincides with special rounds (usually every 4 rounds) that modify the rules. Some will be harsh, for example, only words with more than six letters can score, or your first letter is picked for you. Others will swap out all letters after each word, or it will freeze a row of letters out of play. It was these rounds that threw the curveballs that often drained my turns I’d saved, and led me to failure on medium, hard, and master difficulties.
Everything in Word Play works well, and there are a few decent accessibility options, such as dyslexic fonts and high contrast colour schemes, too. Whilst the game is English only out of the box, there is a tutorial to add in your own custom words, which is a great addition for non-English languages. There is also a casual mode if you aren’t a fan of the roguelike strategy elements of the game. It turns it into Scaggle, as I call it, a merger of the two word games. There is little to complain about here, except that the modifier perks are more powerful than anything else, so it is often preferable to buy them first. The other consideration I’ll raise is that you’ll need a thesaurus to beat the harder difficulties if you aren’t already a wordsmith. This game is punishing on the hardest two difficulties, so I started to see what words were available to me using a word finder tool. This let me experience the hardest difficulty without crashing out too early, and I can confirm, it’s hard! Is it cheating? Probably. I’ll graduate to doing it on my own soon…
Word Play is well worth your time if you enjoy Scrabble, Boggle, or word games that require more than just thinking about the letters in front of you. The strategy plays a key role in your survival, so get your vocabulary at the ready for a mighty test.
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