A Little Wordy is a word deduction game for 2 players from Exploding Kittens.
As a fan of modern board games, I still enjoy Scrabble. It’s a decent game, but I am pretty terrible at it. To win at Scrabble, you must have a vast vocabulary and be good at using the special squares. My girlfriend has a great vocabulary, so I pretty much lose all the time. Over the years, we’ve tried many 2 player games and I’m always on the lookout for word games because they’re usually pretty easy to learn. When I saw that A Little Wordy had just come out from Exploding Kittens (the company with the same name as their card game), which has the selling point of not needing a mighty vocabulary, I purchased it immediately!
A Little Wordy is a simple, word deduction game.
Each player blindly grabs some consonant and vowel tiles then create and writes down a word using said tiles before passing them off to their opponent. With their opponent’s tiles in hand, each player now attempts to guess the word their opponent wrote down.
During your turn, you can take one of two actions:
Action One – guess a word. If you’re wrong, your opponent gets 2 point “berries” (fitting with the birdy theme) and your turn is over.
Action Two – There are 2 piles of shuffled clue cards with different point values on them. Choose any clue card and your opponent must answer the clue. They receive the point value indicated on the card in exchange for the clue. Clue cards range from simple actions such as “Vowel Count” for 2 points, where your opponent must tell you how many vowels are in their word to “Rhyme Time” for 5 points, where your opponent must say a word that rhymes with their secret word.
You win in A Little Wordy by using as few clues or low point clues as possible to figure out your opponent’s word. Once you guess your opponent’s word, they now have the chance to use more clues to guess your word. Whoever has the most points at the end of the game wins. If there is a tie, count down from three, then the first person to create a new, 4-letter word with the tiles in front of them, wins.
I enjoy A Little Wordy, but I think it still has the issue that Scrabble and many other word games possess. If your opponent is good at word games, they’re probably going to win. A Little Wordy claims that using long, sophisticated words isn’t always the best strategy because they will stand out to someone who plays a lot of word games, but silly words like “turd” might be overlooked by these people. I found that any time I attempted a small easy word to try and trick my girlfriend, it didn’t work; she just won faster. As quickly as 2 rounds, in some cases.
Exploding Kittens will most likely sell expansions to the game.
My guess is in the form of more clue cards, which the game desperately needs. There are 2 types of clue cards: 6 “vanilla” and 10 “spicy” cards. Each round, 4 of each are shuffled and placed as that round’s clues. As you may have guessed, many of the cards are seen if you are playing many rounds of the game in a row, so the game just doesn’t have enough cards to keep things interesting for multiple plays in a row.
I’ll still grab A Little Wordy to play here and there, but it is definitely a filler game.
For $14.99, it’s a decent value and fun little word game despite a weak tiebreaker and a lack of diversity in its clue cards.
3/5 – Future expansions could help bump this up to a 4.
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