Entering Dr. Finn’s world of word games

Dr. Finn’s Book of Solo Strategy and Word Games Contains three different word games: Word Wrap, Leftover Letters and Spell It Out.

To be honest, I don’t feel like I have enough to say about each one specifically for a blog each. Which isn’t to say that I think they are bad or dislike them. Quite on the contrary, as someone who generally isn’t into word games, I think they’re downright brilliant.

All of them are Roll and Writes. While they are all designed to be played as solitaires, there is no reason that you can’t play the multiplayer Take It Easy Style. They also all show a strong Scrabble influence. Letters are worth specific amounts of points and there are rules for multiplying letter and word scores.

Leftover Letters is the most complex game by virtue of having three steps. You start out with a seven by seven grid that already has some letters in it. Step one: You roll dice to fill in the fourteen empty spots. Step two: Keep rolling dice to scratch out letters, using the dice to determine the coordinates for points where four boxes come together. (So you have four letters to pick from) Step three: make words out of each column and row with the letters you have left. You don’t have to use all the letters in a group but the more letters, the more points.

Spell It Out, on the other hand, is the simplest game of the three. Possibly the simplest game in the entire book. You have a blank crossword-style layout that has space for six 2-letter words, four 4-letter words, and two 5-letter words. Every turn, roll two dice and pick a letter a group for each pip. After you fill in all the empty spaces, score all the words that are actually words.

Word Wrap changes things up by having you drawing Tetris–style shapes on a grid of letters. After you draw each shape, you write the letters you just encircled in the spaces for two 3-letter words, two 4-letter words, one 5-letter word, one six-letter word, and one 7-letter word. After you’ve filled every space in, score all the words that are actual words.

Frankly, if I put a playsheet in front of you, you’d have an idea how to play before I even started going over the rules. More than that, you’d be playing in less than five minutes. All these games are very accessible. Even more than that, use of the Scrabble’s visual language helps make the games accessible.

On top of that, I found that the games offered choices, particularly at the start. Near the end, they become more push your luck as you hope to get the letters you need to finish the words you want to make. They are all quick games, none of them lasting long enough to get tedious.

While FlipWord remains my go-to word game, I enjoyed all three of these more than my previous favorite Roll and Write word game, which was Lingo Land by Dark Imp. (Sorry, Ellie Dix) In fact, my reaction to playing Spell It Out was to play it again.

Word games aren’t my go-to for gaming, although I seem to have played plenty of them by this point. With that said, word games are clearly a large and successful niche of the gaming world. And I think all three of these games are ones that Word gamers would really enjoy. I think making them a part of the book was a very wise choice on Steve Finn’s part.