Addictionary product reviews

I liked playing this game, it really made you think. It is a word game with a bit of a twist. It starts out easy and it becomes really hard to make words as the size of the board increase. The best way I can describe it is that it is a little bit like chess with words, you have to anticipate the moves that the other players are going to make.

It is also a good way to improve spelling and vocabulary for most ages. The fun factor in this game was a little bit lost on me and it was to much work and not enough fun.

It was a good game to play but I would not rank it my all time favourite game of all time.

Now this game really took me by surprise. At first glance, it seems simple enough... use the cards to make words on a strange little expanding rack frame... and that's where it stops being simple, and starts being the kind of challenege I enjoy.

Scoring is made of a few simple rules, but once the words start getting bigger, the scores start becoming larger, fast. Actual calculations are required, above and beyond simple addition, just to score a single word. By the end of a half-hour game, the scores were well into the 40's per word! And we still hadn't fully expanded the frame to the full 9-letter range.

The real challenge comes when you get to a point where the cards are running low, you have a handful of vowels and blanks, and you are stuck trying to work out what you could turn the present word into, even if you HAD more cards and the right letters. My opponent even tried to make words with holes in them, just so we had SOMETHING to play on with! (Of course, you can't do that, all the letters must sit side by side and not be broken by blank cards... but it was looking like that was the only way to proceed!)

Overall, this is a great game for any wordsmiths out there, and if your bedtime reading as a child involved a leather-bound dictionary, you'll be in hog-heaven playing this instead of your more usual 'Scrabble' game. The game frame is unique, and adds an extra degree of challenge, in that you can't slide the cards along a space if you hit one end, so long-term strategy comes into play too... simply slapping an 'S' on the end every few rounds isn't going to last long, or make the game easier as you near the end... quite the opposite actually. A great gift idea for any occasion.