First Impression: Letter Roll

By W. Eric Martin
June 5, 2009

Designer: Tushar Gheewala
Publisher: Out of the Box Publishing
Players: 2-8
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Two half games, once with four and once with three

Word games can be a tough sell when you’re trying to satisfy a group of random players. One or two braniacs can kill the game for everyone else, and anyone who’s less than comfortable with this genre might be squirming in her seat waiting for the pain to end. Scrabble suffers from this problem, which is exacerbated by players who memorize lists of obscure two- and three-letter words. Boggle largely keeps this problem in check thanks to a time limit and a common pool of letters for all players.

Letter Roll, a title that resembles Milton Bradley’s Wordsters, runs headlong into this quandary, despite players having a one- or two-minute time limit in which to write down words. The game includes seven 20-sided letter dice: two white dice with more commonly used letters, three blue with less common letters, and two brown with the least commonly used letters. On a turn, a player rolls four dice of her choice, then the player to her left removes one of them from play. All players then race to write down words that include the three letters showing on the dice; the letters can be in any order and need not be adjacent. Once time is up, players cross out answers they have in common and score one point for each word that remains. The player with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins.

The openness of Letter Roll is both a strength and a drawback. Unlike Wordsters, which requires players to create words using three letters in a particular order, players are free to go in any direction, which sometimes leads to answers you’d never expect. The letters Q-C-D, for example, led to “quicksand,” “conquered,” “conquistidor” and “quiched.” (We didn’t allow that last one.) That said, players with strong vocabularies will use this freedom to run rampant over everyone else, such as those who write “quiched” when presented with the letters Q-C-D. Plurals, adjectival forms and verb conjugations are all allowed, which further advantages already strong players as one obscure word can frequently become three or four.

One strangeness with the game is that the dice with infrequently used letters can turn a round into two minutes of quiet chin-scratching, as when we were presented with J-F-W. We puzzled and puzzled ‘til our puzzlers were sore, but delivered nothing more than funny non-words: jawful, flowjuice, jewfez, fjordwonk. A subsequent search on an online word constructor of 168,000 words turned up zero matches using this combination of letters!

Since opponents in each of my two games were clearly suffering, I offered to halt the game. With evenly matched players, Letter Roll could prove to be a winner, but until I’m next at a writers’ conference, I’ll reach for other word games instead.

Want to try Letter Roll for yourself? Head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page!

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