Letter Grab!
- Board's Eye View
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Brad Ross' design for Letter Grab! (Outset Media) feels like it's the lovechild of Scrabble (Hasbro) and Hanabi (AbacusSpiele). Scrabble is the world's best known (tho' not the world's best) word game and Hanabi is a card game where the cards you have fanned out in your hand show something different to the other players than to the player holding them. In Letter Grab, then, the 2-6 players have a hand of five double-sided letter cards, fanned so that they can only see the letters or letter combinations (eg: CH, RE, QU, ST, ING) that were on the cards' originally face-down side; other players can see the different letters on the reverse.
The letters and letter combos have values 1-4 (vowels and some common-frequency consonants are value 1, other letters and combos on the reverse are value 2-4). On your turn, you take any one card from any opponent, exchanging it for a card in your own hand. You must then use the card (side visible to you when you took it) along with any cards from your hand to make a word, scoring for it the total value of the cards used, but with a 3-point bonus if you use all five cards. After your turn you draw back up to five cards. The rules suggest playing over six rounds but varying the number of turns per round according to the number of players (ranging from 3 turns each in a six-player game to 10 turns each with just two players).
Letter Grab makes for a fast, fun word game. You can, in the main, plan your next turn while others are taking theirs; tho' obviously another player may snatch a card you'd been planning to use. Letter Grab works especially well as a two-player game, tho' 10 turns each for six rounds may seem excessive and you might want to house rule a reduced number of turns. The other house rule we'd recommend is allowing players the option of discarding cards from their hand at the end of their turn, perhaps at a cost of one point per discard.
