Game 125: UpWords

 
I've said this of a couple of games I've posted about recently, but I REALLY cannot believe that in the nearly three years that I've been blogging our games that we hadn't played UpWords!  It feels like we play it all the time, but I guess as I get older time goes faster?  I played today with my two youngest sons, both of whom over the years have become formidable word-game players.  They're actually just here visiting as they have recently both moved out.  This new empty-nesting situation (especially in the midst of a pandemic) is going to make finding opportunity for gaming even more challenging.  But, we got to game today, so that's good.  I don't know if I can label this game a classic, but I think it's close.  I would call Scrabble a classic.  This game has been around since the 1980s (I think), so it has stood the test of time, and it is a lot like Scrabble in that players are building words by placing letter tiles on a grid.  Differences are that with UpWords, you can stack letter tiles on top of other letter tiles, the board is smaller, and there aren't special scoring bonuses for building on certain grid squares.
Mixing the letter tiles
Each one of us has taken our first turn - another difference from Scrabble is that here you don't get extra points for certain letters like J or Z.
I only pulled 4 vowels all game.  More than once I had doubles of 3 letters - consonants of course!
Starting to build UP
Really moving up!  The stacks are limited to a height of 5, which is an important limitation but feels like a bummer.  If you change two words (by having a letter in both) you get to count both words and you count the height of the stack twice, so once you hit the max of 5 it puts an end to some very tantalizing letter placement options.  Another limitation is the size of the board - much smaller than a Scrabble board.  Here too, I often feel like it's a difficult restriction because I wish I could make a word that was one letter long, but the board doesn't have room.  But I think these two restrictions are well balances.
And it's Caleb for the win with the I and G to make "TINGE," "MID," and "GOWN"

We were a little disappointed that we didn't have any super-impressive words today, but we had fun playing!

OH, and this is our first game in our list starting with the letter U!  It's about time!

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