Defenders of the Dictionary
Crowdfunding Gen Con

Defenders of the Dictionary – Crowdfunding Preview

Let’s talk about the next game that I got to play a preview of, this one is Defenders of the Dictionary. Defenders of the Dictionary is a cooperative word game coming from Adam’s Apple Games. When it was announced, I wasn’t all that convinced by it. The cover was fun, but the theme didn’t jump out at me. I like Letter Jam as a cooperative word game, but could that happen twice?

How to Win in Defenders of the Dictionary

The answer is play multiple games to really get the win. You need to collect enough stars to beat the bad guy, and that takes more stars than you can get in a single game. Let’s talk about how you get stars. There are four ways to get stars.

Firstly is to complete words. If you get enough points from words, you will get a star. Then there are private objectives, if everyone completes theirs, you get a star. Plus there are mission points on the board, you connect two, you get a star. And finally, if you trap both minions, you get a star. You need five to defeat the bad guy, but you won’t always get all four.

How to Play Defenders of the Dictionary

Like I said, this is a cooperative word game. But what surprise people is that it’s based off of Scrabble to some extent. Players have letters in front of them and with limited communication they need to pick some to use in a word. In a two player game, I pick two and my teammate picks two. Or in a four player game, each player picks one.

Then everyone reveals their letters. They combine their letter and the bad guys letter into a word to play on the board, like Scrabble. Any letters not used are saved for the next word. And if you don’t use the bad guy’s letter, then you take negative points to offset the positive points you got from the word. You continue to build out your words until you decide to stop.

But that doesn’t seem that hard, maybe if no one has a vowel, but even then you can connect often to one that is already played. But there are some other rules to note. Mainly that you only have limited space to store letters. So if you run out of space after a word, you not only lose points for the bad guys letter, you also lose for your highest value unused letters.

Game Play Highlights

Firstly, I think it was just a highlight for me that it worked. I didn’t know how it was going to work and like I said, I wasn’t super excited for it. But when I got to demo it, I really enjoyed how the system worked. Sometimes you can be really clever and put out a great word with the bad guy letter. Other times, because the bad guy letters are hard, and maybe no one added a vowel, you end up eating some points one round. It’s a good push your luck that way.

I also like that the board itself is not just a standard Scrabble board. There are no double word or triple letter spaces. Instead, there are spots where there are rivers that you can’t go across. And sometimes a building or two will block your path. So it’s not as simple to play out a word as it might seem. That with the minions who might also mess up things also make it trickier when playing words.

What I Want To See More Of

I think how the scenarios work is interesting. I call them scenarios, it might be more like the games or specific bad guy set-ups. But because you just can go until you want to stop, or at least that is how I was taught, it made it pretty easy. We went until we hit three goals and stopped. Connecting up missions points, getting your private goals, and scoring enough points weren’t that hard. I want to see if that can be harder to do at some point in time.

I also want to test it out with more players. I played at two and it wasn’t too bad to make words. Sometimes we were short on vowels, but never too bad. I wonder with more players if it is going to make the game more challenging in a good way. I could see it going either way. I wish my demo had more people, but Defenders of the Dictionary wasn’t one that I saw talked about a ton going into Gen Con.

Final Thoughts and Impressions

I enjoy this game. I don’t know that it would ever be one of my favorites, but there is a lot good going for it. And in terms of word games, it is one of the better ones I’ve played. I like Letter Jam better, but both of these feel like good games. And I like the cooperative nature of it as well. It helps with the whole, whomever has the largest vocabulary wins feelings that some word games have.

Do you like word games, is this one you want to checkout on crowdfunding?

Follow the project here.

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