Letterpress

Letterpress is the remake – and more widely available – version of Movable Type. As with it’s predecessor, this is a word game played over five rounds, where players collect letters over the first four rounds for the final showdown in the fifth.

The above sentence really does most of the explaining! In each round one yellow vowel card is laid face-up along two green letter cards (that may contain vowels as well). Players are dealt a hand of five letter cards and then draft them: keeping one from the five and passing the remainder to your left, then keeping one from the four and so on until the final card is passed, at which point play begins. In each round you simply make the highest-scoring word you can using the letters in your hand and the three shared letters on the table – note that each letter has a point value, so the longest word is not necessarily the highest-scoring! Letterpress also allows you to duplicate a letter in your word, as long as it goes next to the card itself: for instance the cards LETER could become LETTER instead. You don’t get any extra points for this – the ghost letter doesn’t score – but it allows you some more flex as to what words you create.

Once everyone is finished making their word, all are revealed and the highest-scoring player/s take two (their choice) of all the played letters in the round and puts them aside for the fifth round: this is called their collection. All the other players take one letter each. Then new shared cards and new hands are dealt for the next round, and this continues until round five, when the shared cards are laid on the table but instead of being dealt a new hand of cards, players now use the cards in their collection to compete with. Winning the previous four rounds puts you in an excellent position, but it’s not a guarantee of winning the game, and surprises at this point are part of the joy of Letterpress.

We’ve left out one important thing though. In rounds one to four, there are also three purple Challenge cards available for players to claim: they might be for a word that scores a specific point value, a word that uses a certain amount of letters, all or none of the shared letters and so on. If you claim one of the challenge cards they add letters to your deck, and they’re a shrewd way of building your collection without necessarily winning the round in question. These are refreshed at the start of each round (except the fifth) and the winner of the final round wins the game!