Game Review: Word on the Street

By Ted Cheatham and W. Eric Martin
December 2, 2009

Designer: Jack Degnan
Publisher: Out of the Box Publishing

Players: 2-8
Ages: 12+
Playing Time: 20-30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Price: $25
Links:

Ted Cheatham gives the buzz about Word on the Street, a new tug-of-war style word game from Out of the Box:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Twice, both with 2 players

Word games face a special challenge when it comes to finding an audience as the players typically need to fall into the same skill range in order for the game to be enjoyable for all. Someone who’s memorized the Scrabble dictionary, for example, will smoke Joe Conventional Vocabulary in Scrabble or Boggle.

Naturally I wondered whether this would be a problem in Word on the Street, a game in which players (or teams) have 30 seconds to provide an answer fitting a category and move the letters on the board found in that answer. The first category presented to my wife, a nutrition and health writer, was “part of an apple.” Her answer? “Phytonutrients.”

Yikes.

After the first turn the “T” was already in her score pile and a wave of other letters was swarming her way. Thankfully the categories turned out to be broad enough that a large general vocabulary will not win the game on its own. Other categories – “something that is folded,” “a two-person game or sport,” “something that comes in a box,” “a type of fastener” – challenge players to be creative, a la Scattergories, rather than simply well-read.

What’s more, as letters near your edge of the board, or the opponent’s edge, you naturally focus on brainstorming words that include those letters in order to lock them into your scoring column or prevent the opponent from grabbing them easily next turn. “I have an ‘N’ and ‘F’ close to me and the category is something people commonly hide. I could say ‘fantasy’ but the ‘T’ and ‘S’ are already out of play. What else? ‘Snuff film’ is two words and arguably not common.” And all the while you’re doing this, time is draining away through the sandtimer. Sometimes 30 seconds passes much faster than you’d think.

And sometimes it doesn’t, which is my only real beef with the game. Roughly half the time we chose a word and moved letters in roughly 15 seconds, which meant we spent another 15 seconds waiting for the sand to run out before moving on with the game. Fifteen seconds doesn’t sound like a long time to twiddle one’s thumbs, but the herky-jerky pace of game play was bothersome. Who wants to spend one-quarter of a game with both players staring at a timer? Including a second timer in the game would have allowed us to pump through categories and kept the pace quick quick quick.

With only 17 tiles in the game and a player needing to score eight to win, I initially worried that the endgame would be a drag, with players tugging the last few tiles back and forth turn after turn, but neither game turned out that way, even though both were close. Instead, what I thought would be a bug turned out to be a feature. Magic the Gathering’s Mark Rosewater often talks about how restrictions breed creativity, and having only those few tiles available spurs you to think up some fabulous answer with a double “V” or somesuch. You become desperate, a sinking man with only a few letter sticks available for the grabbing. Will you be able to clutch the answer in time?

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