Spell a word from the five cards in your hand; what it earns buys better letters into your deck. A word game and an engine-builder at once. 1 to 6 people, about 15 minutes.
It is the only game on this shelf that gets *better* at what it is doing while you play it. Everybody starts with the same ten cards — five soft vowels and five blanks — and by chapter eight one person is spelling nine-letter lines out of syllables they bought and somebody else is still writing fours. Nothing about that is luck, and all of it happened where the table could watch.
Everybody writes at the same time, so there is no turn order and no dead air in the half of the game that takes the longest. The queue only exists afterwards, it is over in fifteen seconds, and watching it is part of the fun: you can see the card you were writing towards being taken.
It is generous to a mixed table in a way most word games are not. A three-letter line is a legal line and it earns; the blanks in the starting deck mean nobody is ever stuck for something to write; and the money is mostly in the type rather than in the vocabulary, so somebody who reliably finds ordinary five-letter words can build the best deck at the table.
A round
On the sheet
Also on