Word Domination

Despite the despots and crackpots theme and family-oriented artwork, Word Domination is really geared towards lovers of word games such as Scrabble – although the largest vocabulary doesn’t by any means guarantee a win, as we shall see.

The board is actually a bunch of letter tiles shuffled and laid out in a grid (how big depends on how many players). Each player is dealt a single tile, and on your turn you add the tile to the edge of the grid somewhere, and then spell out a word using as many available letters as you can. The key thing here is you must use your own letter – all other letters are optional. When you spell out the word, you put an airship of your own colour on each tile to show ownership. If you’re placing your second airship here – because you also used the letter in a previous round – you claim the tile itself as a point. It’s removed from the grid and kept in front of you, and an upside-down tile (marked Stolen) goes in its place, with one of your airships on it to denote ownership.

The first catch is that a single airship can be bumped off the grid by another player using the same letter – so there’s no guarantee your airship will still be present when your next turn comes around! The second catch is that after six rounds, when points are scored, any letters you stole that are adjacent on the grid score double – so whilst four isolated tiles are four points, next to each other they are worth 8 instead. Note too that although unclaimed letters don’t score, they can link claimed letters by the same player together on the grid.

Finally note that some of the letters have a special power when used – such as reserving a letter, or adding an extra airship. These are all clearly listed on your player boards, and using them adds a little spice or occasionally a game-winning flourish! Key to victory though is the tactical play of when to bump others and when to claim tiles.