I read Allison Parrish's article "Rewordable versus the alphabet fetish," in which she discusses the design of the card game Rewordable. Like Scrabble and Bananagrams, in Rewordable a player builds up words from parts. Unlike Scrabble tiles and Bananagrams tiles, a Rewordable card might have more than one letter on it. Parrish points out:
We sort of take it for granted that spelling games will use letters as their unit. But why should this be the case?
And I thought Oho, yes. Those past game designers fell into this trap. Such buffoons! And then I remembered that I had made a game in which one builds up words, uhm, from letters. I couldn't throw stones at those buffoons, for I resided in a glass house of buffoonery myself.
So I tweaked the game: Bewordled can now have more than one letter in a square.
Now the Bewordled game is that much more compelling. This could be good news for me if wildfire smoke keeps me indoors for a few days.
