Down and Across, a Will Shortz game

We picked up a few games at Barnes & Noble today.  I went in there specifically to get the latest Scrabble Dictionary, because I have another blog where I specifically talk about word and word games, and sequences of words, and I wanted an easy way to note which words were Scrabble words, without having to type every word into a darn web search.

Will Shortz is a puzzle legend, and his website and amazing profile can be found here. I remember way back when he was the editor of Games magazine, but his credits are as much fun to read as any set of game rules.  I wish I had accomplished one tenth of what he did in the realm of gaming.

I grabbed this game because it sounded very simple, and it was as simple as it sounded.  Basically, as a two player game, each player draws 15 letter tiles from the box, and someone rolls the four big chunky dice.  The dice combos give the rules, and it's a race to see who can build the first two-word crossword solution to the rules shown on those dice.  The rules come in pairs: a word length and a word rule.  So you might get "5 letter word, nonliving object" in one direction and "3 letter word, ends with a vowel" in the other direction.

One colored pair of dice gives the rules for the horizontal word, the other pair gives the rules for the vertical word.  The combinations are naturally a bit limited, but they did provide a good half hour of fun getting the feel of it.  You can grab extra tiles when you need them.

As you probably know, we don't do speed games or dexterity games.  So we did not race to see who can get the solution first, but if we did, the winner would get one token, and we would shuffle tiles and start again.  Word games can be very unbalanced if the players have wildly different vocabulary sets in their heads.  We just let one person finish first, and then helped each other to finish the second crossword.  I tried to think of a way to score the tiles, but that would feel too much like Scrabble.

The rules give a solid outline of a solitaire version, where you try to solve 5 rounds and judge your success by how many tiles are left in the box when done.  It says that if you end those 5 rounds with 10 tiles left over, that's a perfect game.  But wait, isn't it highly dependent on what came up on the dice?  You could get a 3 letter word and 4 letter word, or a 5 and a 4.  I guess that's not as much of a difference as I thought.  When you complete one puzzle and push the used tiles aside, you might not need to draw 6 or 8 more tiles to solve the next puzzle.  Interesting.

Anyway, this is one we would certainly play some more, especially if we can come up with a fair scoring system to get the speed/stress component out of it.  I'm not sure why it was $24 -- I guess those nice heavy tiles are expensive these days.