Game #53: Abet by Dean Howard (Offcenter)

Hello Dean

Liked the game. This game reminds me of all word and puzzle games I played with my daughters several years ago. As you wrote, there are a lot of Scrabble like games like this out there, but I have not seen any with this mechanism.

I can?t find anything in the rules that indicates any error (or even question marks). But i will keep looking.

One suggestion: With those components make several games. Reuse the same deck of cards all over again ...and again ...and again...
- Make one variant for 4-6 year olds that are eager to learn the alphabet.
- Make a school variant (with the right you have a huge market).
- Make a party variant.
- Make an advanced variant of this family game.
- Try to do a Whist variant.
There are a lot of games that could be made. Put them all in the same rulebook.
With more types of games, you have a bigger market.

// Johan

Very nice! I like this. It has something that I feel is very hard to capture: elegance. I would probably do what Johan said about the variants. Particularly for children. This is a game that schools would allow (encourage?) kids to play and the school system might be a big potential client. Good Luck!

Eugene

Dean, thanks for sharing this game with us. The design looks like really nice and elegant. It's basically a "one-idea" game, which means that either it works, or it doesn't and that makes it hard to comment on. If it works (and apparently you playtesting shows that it does) than you have something that could possibly get published one day.

That said, there are a few things I'd like to comment on.

I see that the scores of letters on individual cards range from 3 to 17, correct? Perhaps it is a good idea to divide all the scores of the letters by three. Or perhaps some of the easier letters can even score zero points, as you give a bouns to lonher words as well. Smaller numbers are easier to compute, which is especially important when children are part of your target audience. The scoring will be less finer grained this way and I can imagine that there will be some letters that you really want to let score one and a half point, but I think you might want to sacrifice a bit of balance for simplicity in this game. Of course, you would also need to tweak the other scoring mechanisms again.

I think you can do away with the pictures on the cards. The focus should be on the letters. Let a publisher decide the final design of the cards and whether they want pictures on it or not. If you are going to self-publish this game then I think the pictures are a nice touch, but I would make them less prominent and I would remove the word on the card, which would just be confusing. Instead use pictures which everyone immediately recognizes and knows the first letter of. You could even do something with the colors, for example the yellow B is a banana, the red S a strawberry, the yellow S the sun, etc. I wouldn't bother with this if you are just making a prototype to show to publishers, though, as it is probably a lot of work.

Also, add a little symbol in the corner the cards to differentiate the colors. Being colorblind I have a hard time distinguishing between the green and the red on your cards. I would also make the colored borders much bigger and print the letters and their scores in both corners (left and right)of the card. Some people like to fan their cards just the other way round, you know.

About the cooperative scoring: I like it in principle and I understand why it is there. However, keep in mind that it useless in a 2 player game, because it is zero sum. Therefore I think it would be nice if the player adding the letters and the player who made the original word both score something different for the word. Perhaps the original player of the word gets points for the whole word, while the extending player just scores points for the extra letters, or the other way round? At least something that makes it less zero-sum. That way it would actually mean something in a 2-player game and I also think it makes for more interesting decisions in multiplayer games.

"Exception: you can't just add an S at the end of a word if it only creates a plural or verb form". What if you change this to: "you always need to add at least two letters to an existing word"? That would make extending a word a little harder (which may or not be desirable) and you could drop this particular rule. Not a big deal, but I prefer "clean" rules to rules that are obviously just needed to prevent a "broken" strategy or some other quirk.

Acceptable words. I would leave the phrase "All words must be single, unhyphenated English words found in whatever dictionary the players agree to use.", but I would cut out the bit about challenging words and taking back unacceptable words. Just state what the players may and may not do, don't tell them what to do when someone breaks the rules, leave that to the players themselves. The problem with rules like these is that you are implicitly allowing players to make unacceptable words, as long as no one notices or has the guts to challenge them.

A minor thing that will probably rarely ever happen in real play, but which you may want to cover anyway, just in case... What happens if the deck runs out? I think you can solve this issue neatly by stating that a round also ends when someone draws the last card of the deck, because that way the game will always end even when players for some reason cannot form any words anymore.

Anyway, good luck!

- René Wiersma