Designed by: Matthew Inman
A Little Wordy is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a word game – for two players (although we’ve also played as teams of two). Each side draws consonants (7) and vowel (4) tiles from the respective bags and secretly makes a word using only those tiles, writing it down on the laminated card provided and keeping it out of sight.
Then the players swap tiles: now both sides know what letters may have been used to make the hidden word: the challenge is to deduce the word, and this is done by activating cards. There are eight available in each game, and the cards prompt your opponent to reveal something about their word: it might be first or last letter, how many vowels, word length, or simply whether a specific letter features in the word or not. The catch is that each card activation has a cost in berries: when you use it, you pay X number of berries to your opponent. If you’re simply asking whether a single letter features or not, that’s not too expensive: one berry. But asking for the first letter in the secret word costs a whopping four berries. As the player (or team) with the most berries wins, you need to be economic with the cards you activate!
Guessing is an alternative to activating a card. If you’re confident, you can guess the word: a wrong guess gifts your opponent two berries, however. If you guess correctly and already have the most berries, you win! If you have less berries, though, your opponent keeps playing: their challenge is to guess your word before gifting you more berries than they already have.
None to speak of
Whilst your opponent is trying different combinations of letters, you can be doing the same
Rules-wise it's very light, albeit the potential for the game to continue after a successful guess feels slightly counter-intuitive (and hard to explain!) But the main cognitive effort is about working out the wordy possibilities of the tiles in front of you
If you like a short, silly word game for two with a deductive flavour, then A Little Wordy is pretty much infinitely replayable: the cards change from game and the letter combos always provide a new challenge.
2-2
Players
8+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
I'm always inclined to like word games and A Little Wordy is happily no exception: it's a little silly, and a little odd, with a slightly unintuitive ending. But it's fun: a speedy-ish game of word deduction you can teach in a minute, and play in ten minutes, but with a bona fide challenge nestled beneath the accessibility. A little gem.