Typewriter

• Designers: Tim Fowers, Jeff Beck, Skye Larsen
• Publisher: Fowers Games
• Players: 2-5
• Age: 10+
• Time: 30 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Spell words, flip your typewriter keys, and build combos in this new game in the Paperback series. This travel-ready game comes in a small box, and can even be stored in the included zipper bag. Acrylic tiles instead of cards mean even a bit of rain or ocean spray won’t dampen your fun.

Every turn, you will spell a word with the tiles in front of you. Use all your starting tiles in the word to send a tile to your scoring stack. And at the end of each round you’ll grab a shiny new tile for yourself from the offer. Since you can only take a tile from the offer after your turn, you can start spelling out your next word while the other players take their turns.  Sounds simple enough. But there’s one more twist: every time you spell a word, you’ll flip all the tiles in that word, revealing new letters and a completely new puzzle.

The tiles you take might have potent abilities that can be recharged by using a letter in your word to flip them back over, or you might grab tiles that help you score set collection points at the end of the game. Other tiles are bigrams that let you claim common vowels, and sometimes a tile just has a real tough letter that can score for real big points.

Each player starts with the four starting keys (N, R, S, T) and each player can choose any two of these to flip over to the wild ? side.  The rest of the keys are mixed in the bag, each player draws three of them and chooses two to keep white-side up.  The unchosen key is returned to the bag.  Each player has their own typewriter board which is front of them.

Four keys are drawn from the bag and placed on the table to form the Offer.  The wild keys and temporary wild chits are laid out nearby.  Finally, 9 Event cards are drawn at random and made into an Event deck.  At the start of every round, an Event card is drawn from this deck and read aloud – this will give the table a new rule which is in effect for the entirety of that round.  As you might surmise, the game therefore lasts 9 rounds as that is how many Event cards you set aside at the start.

On a turn, the active player goes through these five phases:

1] Spell a Word – using the keys in front of them as well as the top key from the Common stack, the player makes a word.

2] Fill the Meter – Add up the value of each key in your letter and move your Typing token that many spaces on your Typewriter card

3] Use your Meter – you can choose to reset your meter to zero in order to use up to three abilities of different colors.  This might allow you to Bank or Star certain keys (put them aside on your typewriter board where they can’t be used in future words).  Banked keys give you victory points equal to their value at the end of the game.  Starred keys give you victory points equal to the number on them as well as for each gold star next to the number.

4] Flip the keys in your word – any remaining keys in your word are flipped to their other side.

5] Claim a Key from the Offer – take one letter key from the offer and add it to your pool. Replace the key in the offer with a new one from the bag.  Also, if you managed to create a word of nine or more letters, you can bank the top key of the common pile.  Note that the bottom key in the stack can never be banked.

Note that some of your keys may have actions on them, and you can use these actions at any time that it makes sense to do so.  Once you use the action, you flip that key over to its letter side.  There are three different colors, each broadly having its own theme/class of action.

The game ends when the Event deck is exhausted (nine rounds).  At this point, players score their Banked and Starred Keys.  The player with the most points wins. Ties broken in favor of the player with the most starred keys.

My thoughts on the game

Typewriter was always on my radar as I love word games – though this is not a love shared by many of the gamers that I regularly play with. Fowers Games definitely lean towards the literary (the other game of theirs that I’ve played is Paperback), and this fits well within that theme/genre.

While the bulk of the game is about making/anagramming words, there is a little bit of a deckbuilding feel to the game as you add new keys to your pool.  Additionally, players have to make interesting decisions throughout the course of the game as they remove keys from their pool to score them.  Each of these decisions will clearly impact your “engine” as the scoring value at the end of the game is equal to the meter value when used to make words.

Of course, there is a timing aspect to this as the keys will be flipped over each time you use them (or use a key action to flip them), and the values on each side are different.  So, you’ll have to generate/take the Bank action when you have the desired side of the key face up in play.  

Some of the keys have actions on them, but the bulk of the actions will come from your meter – which you generate by scoring the letters used in your words. When you choose to use your meter, it resets back to zero – so you’ll have to determine when the best time is to use your meter points.  Additionally, it may depend on which letters you have used in your current word – i.e. you might not want to use your bank action if you don’t have a valuable letters in your word to move to the bank.

The game flow is simple, you make a word in each of the nine rounds of the game; which doesn’t sound like a lot… and the box claims this to be a thirty minute game.   I’ll start by saying that our 5p game was closer to 60-75 minutes.  And I don’t think that we were dawdling – once the first person in our game took their turn, they’d peek at the rule for the next round so they could already start some planning towards their next turn…

I personally like the puzzle of anagramming my letter keys to try to come up with the best word possible.  The process isn’t as easy as it seems though – as the game progresses, you could gain some keys with actions that can slow you down.  Additionally, it’s possible to have a LOT of wild cards in your pool, and this exponentially increases the word possibilities – and this is one situation that my brain doesn’t handle well.  As a result, some of the turns took longer than others to figure out due to the high number of possibilities.  The decision on which key to draft at the end of the round could also be a slow process as it isn’t always obvious which letter will be the best one to take.

took me awhile to see that I had Marketing

The other wildcard for turn length starts around the third turn – once players have enough keys in their possession to generate 9 letter words, the common vowel available could change.  And… if you’ve planned your word using the current letter, you might have to start over from scratch when a new vowel is suddenly now in play (and one that doesn’t work for your word).

As with many games in the word genre, you’ll already know if you’re predisposed to it or not.  I am a lover of word games, and I have enjoyed my plays thus far.  The game is a bit longer than advertised (but we have also always played at a high player count), but I’m fairly involved in the wordcrafting, so it hasn’t been too long for me.  

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…