Toy Fair 2013—A Way With Words

Try Try a Game describes A Way With Words as a “reverse word search game” and I sort-of get what they mean by that. The game’s board is a grid, seeded with vowels. Players start with three letter chips and each turn can play one chip anywhere on the board. For each letter of each word formed with the chip that they played, they get 1 point—whether that word is spelled forwards, backwards, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally—whether it represents the whole string of adjacent letters or only part of it.

A few of the chips are actually not letters but special actions, for example allowing the player to switch two chips already on the board.

In a variant, everyone plays simultaneously, only able to place a chip if it forms a word of three or more letters. The first to get rid of all his chips is the winner.