It’s the month of February. That time of year when you and your partner are expected to do “partnery” things together: watch a movie, cook and/or eat a nice meal, go for a pleasant springtime walk (if you don’t live in Canada), or play a game. The only trouble is, that it is getting harder and harder to find a board game built for two. “Three or more players” is much more common now, or games listed as for “two to four”, but the two-player game is a disappointment compared to the multiplayer version. That’s why I was pleasantly surprised when I was shopping and found a game that specifically said “Two players”: A Little Wordy, by Exploding Kittens.
A Little Wordy is, as you would expect, a word game, but it’s also a guessing game and a strategy game. The goal isn’t to flex your vocabulary muscles by building lots of words worth lots of points. You and your opponent each draw tiles and build ONE word. All the standard word-build rules apply: No capitalized nouns, no abbreviations, no misspelled words or words not found in a dictionary. The Exploding Kittens website even offers a dictionary for you to use, although it uses a “verify this word” search engine, to thwart that type of player who tries to “dictionary surf” for a great word. (Don’t lie, you’ve done it before.) The other main difference between this and your average Word Builder game is there is no word size limit. That means that you could build a massive, eleven-letter word using all your tiles. But if you want to be super sneaky, you could also use one or two-letter words. That’s right, ”a”, “an”, “I”, “or”, “by”, and all the rest of the tiny words are all perfectly valid.
After you have each chosen and written down your secret word, the next stage is guessing your opponent’s word. Both players exchange letter tiles, so you can always see the letters that were used to make the word you are guessing. To make guessing a bit easier, there are Clue Cards. Each game has eight Clue Cards chosen during setup. Four Vanilla Clues and four Spicy Clues. The Vanilla Clues are all basic information: How long is the word?; What is the first letter?; Is this particular letter part of the word?. Spicy Clues provide more details, but they may require you to give up information about your own word, too. For example, “Let’s Share” requires both you and your opponent to choose a letter tile; then you each reveal whether that letter is in your word. Spicy Clues can also be worth more points than Vanilla Clues. That’s right, clues aren’t free: each card is worth a number of “berries”. Berry Tokens are your victory points in this game. But you don’t earn berries and then spend them. Whenever you activate a Clue Card, you must give the cost of the card to your opponent. Since you can only win if you guess correctly AND have the most berries, the goal is to use as few clues as possible, while forcing your opponent to use more. This adds an interesting level of strategy to the game. Is getting that really useful Clue worth handing over three, four or even five points? Can you get away with only using the low point value Clues?
Guessing is, of course, the most important part of the game. You can guess on any of your turns, but you cannot guess and get a clue on the same turn. An incorrect guess is punished by giving two Berries to your opponent, so you don’t want to be guessing randomly. And guessing correctly doesn’t necessarily end the game. If you guess a word, but you don’t have enough Berries to win, the game continues. Your opponent can still guess, and you still get Berry Tokens for their clues. If you get enough Berry points to beat your opponent, you win automatically. But if your opponent guesses YOUR word before you get enough points, they win. In the case where both words have been guessed, and both players have the same number of points, there is a speed word Tie Breaker. The first person who can build any dictionary-valid word using the letter tiles in front of them, wins. If one game finishes too quickly, you can play a longer game with multiple rounds. Or, if you are in a larger group, you can organize a tournament.
There are several things that I really like about this game. The first being the components. As always, I love a good “game that fits in your pocket”, and all the parts fit neatly back into a box about the size of a paperback book. There are two fabric bags for the letter tiles included, as well as a plastic zip lock bag for your tokens. There are also whiteboards and pens so you don’t waste paper. The game preemptively solves the biggest word game problem by keeping the vowel and consonant tiles separate. When drawing tiles, you get 7 consonants and 4 vowels, meaning that you never have to worry about not being able to build a word. The instructions all fit on one double-sided sheet of paper, but they are ready for those people who hate rule books. Written right on the page it says “Hey! Don’t read these rules! Reading is the worst way to learn how to play a game. Instead, go online and watch our instructional video.” It’s nice to see a game publisher acknowledge visual learners. They also suggest ways for your first game to be easier to play, in this case by offering the most useful Clue Cards for beginners.
As I mentioned before, this is a word game, but not a vocabulary game. The winner won’t always be the person who uses the biggest word, or the one who has memorized words using rare letters. Sometimes the winner is the player who chose a simple but unexpected word. Or someone who knows the way that their opponent thinks, and can take advantage of this.
Finally, there is the question, would this make a good Valentine’s Day game? I think it does. It’s a simple game that doesn’t require a huge commitment of time and space, so you could easily add it into an evening of activities. It allows for some friendly competition, without the risk of “Monopoly Rage”. As a date night game, it lets you get to know each other. Hey, you could even House Rule a theme for your word choices. A Little Flirty, anyone?
You can find all the Exploding Kittens online at explodingkittens.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/explodingkittens.
