Alphabet War
Scrungo's Alphabet War is a card-shedding word game where the 3–6 players are playing letters to add to or amend words in a bid to be the first player to get rid of all their cards.
Players start off with a hand of eight letter cards and on their turn they can take up to three actions, including the same action multiple times. You can add a letter from your hand to the word on the table, and the letter you add can go anywhere in the word: so you could add an S to POT to make SPOT, POTS or POST. You can remove a letter from a word; so, for example, removing the P from SPOT to give SOT. You can replace a letter of the word with one from your hand, discarding the replaced letter; so, for example, using an I to turn SPOT to SPIT. Finally, you can use an action to rearrange the letters in the word: turning SPIT to TIPS.
Obviously you're trying to get rid of your own cards but canny and competitive players will also be mindful of making things more difficult for the next player. In the unlikely event that a player has no legal play, they're required to draw a card. More significantly, some letter cards also show a + sign that requires the next player to draw the indicated number of cards. Players can defend against this, however, by playing a 'Punch-uation' card (geddit?) that reverses turn order or skips over the next player's turn.
The rules specify that the letter cards must spell an actual word by the end of a player's turn but in our plays at Board's Eye View we found that made the game too easy so we house ruled that every action must create an actual word. It's simple enough to try that variant.
It's often a stretch to make a party game out of a word game but Scrungo have pulled it off with Alphabet War. It's a light card game that plays in around 15 minutes. The rules suggest scaling the game for different age players by altering the allowable word length but the 6+ age indication on the box may still be optimistic even in 'easy' mode.
Alphabet War is available from Amazon, and in the UK it is currently included in the Amazon.co.uk promotion offering 5% off when buying four qualifying items.
