Upwords: Like words, only upper!

We cast about for something new to play, and Carissa spotted Upwords on my top shelf (the box is too big to fit anywhere else). I had picked this up at a thrift shop for $1 but had not yet played it.

The game looked pretty similar to Scrabble. Let me first say that I quite dislike playing Scrabble with 4. The turns take forever, and the game can very easily break the 2-hour mark. I was fearing a similar slog in Upwords.

As it turned out, I was pleasantly surprised. While the game moved a little slowly at first (though still faster than Scrabble due to the fact that there were no double/triple letter/word scores to try and maximize), once the bottom level of the board got fairly full, the game got a bit more interesting. As is hopefully clear from the picture, you can play letters on top of existing letter to form new words. This caused the game to fairly quickly get focused into the parts of the board that had easily modifiable words (compounded by the fact that you score more points for high stacks of letters).

Early in the game, Hilary played "Magpies". We didn't think anything of it other than "cool word" but it actually ended up blocking off a whole area of the board since you can't just change a couple letters in Magpies and come up with a whole new word. On the other side, Lord became Lard became Fund became Funded - actually there were more iterations than that but I can't remember them all.

So chalk up yet another word game I like more than Scrabble (a list that includes Bananagrams, Unspeakable Words, and Boggle).

Scores: Carissa - 124
John - 112
Chris - 104
Hilary - 98

Game time: 90 minutes