Game Review: Word Sweep!

By W. Eric Martin
May 25, 2007

Publisher: Intellinitiative Games
Designer: Steve Smith
Players: 2-4 (or teams)
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Languages: English

Game Played: Final Version
Number of Plays: Once with 4 players, once with 3, and twice with 2

Word Sweep! exemplifies everything that’s both right and wrong with the mainstream American game industry. Let’s start with the negatives, tearing the game apart before we rebuild it.

Like so many other titles aimed at mainstream America, Word Sweep! is built around a single catchy idea, in this case your need to identify three words that appear consecutively in the dictionary. The idea itself (and not necessarily the game) is the selling point. If you don’t like the sound of this idea, then look for another box because that’s all you’ll find here.

This idea is then crystallized in the game’s name, which is then used repeatedly in the rules to cement it in your noggin, e.g., If you correctly guessed all 3 words, you’ve made a “WORD SWEEP!™...” (The rules also include standard mistakes such as using quotes for emphasis: You can choose to “roll the die” at any point during your turn; Opponents may “steal” only after they have moved beyond “Start.")

When you examine the components, you encounter typical extraneous items such as golf pencils, a pad of paper bearing the Word Sweep! logo on each sheet, molded plastic tokens (shaped like books, in this case, with WORD SWEEP! embossed on both front and back cover), and a giant tri-fold gameboard that serves only as a scoring track on which to move your plastic book. The only essential elements for this game are the rules, three decks of cards in cardboard boxes, and a plastic timer—yet it’s packaged with all this other material to justify the $25 retail price. (Word Sweep! has “gift game” written all over it, and games that cost $10 or $15 aren’t respectable gifts, right?)

The cards come in three difficulty levels—everyday, intermediate, and challenging—and here’s a sample challenging card:

First letter = A

Word 1: an instrument for making calculations by sliding counters along rods or grooves

Word 2: to the rear of

Word 3: any of a genus of large edible sea mollusks with a flattened slightly spiral shell with holes along the edge

This is the information you receive on your turn, and you can ask the reader to reread the card. The plastic timer gives you about 40 seconds to come up with three alphabetically consecutive words. This last phrase is another source of trouble because players have found lists of words not in alphabetical order, lists that aren’t really consecutive (the rules note that certain words have been skipped over, but sometimes the skips seem too large), lists of varying degrees of difficulty within the same category, and definitions that give away the word, such as this overly long example: a device consisting of a hub fitted with blades that is made to turn rapidly by an engine and is used especially for propelling airplanes and ships. (The word, in case you didn’t guess it after the first nine words, is “propeller.")

After you give your answers, the reader says only how many words you’ve given correctly. If you’ve given one or two, you move ahead that many spaces; if you’ve given all three, you move ahead three, four or five spaces depending on the card’s difficulty. If you’ve missed any words, then other players may attempt to steal them and score points. Whoever scores 20 points first wins the game.

Despite all the bad-mouthing above, my wife and I (both freelance writers) have really enjoyed the game. The other people we’ve coerced into playing have been less enthusiastic than us, but they seemed to enjoy themselves. In the end, what’s right about the game is that the single hook is enough if you’re playing with fans of word games. In effect, the game is merely an excuse for word afficianados to test their knowledge and parents to trick their children into learning. (Word Sweep! includes junior rules to give tykes a leg up on adults.)

If you don’t like word games or the person for whom you’re gifting doesn’t, then Word Sweep! has nothing to offer you. If you do like word games, though, you’ll run into this game’s final drawback: limited playability. After only four games, we’ve run through one-quarter of the challenging cards, so we have at most a dozen more games before we finish the deck. Sixteen plays isn’t bad for a game, but many other word games can be played for years.

(The answers to the card above: abacus, abaft, abalone.)

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