LogFAQs > #932238090

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Topic	another year of tabletop rankings and writeups
SeabassDebeste 12/30/19 11:52:55 AM #50:	126. Word on the Street (2009) Category: Team vs Team Genres: Party game, word game, spelling Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0 Game length: 25-35 minutes Experience: 4-8 plays with 5-8 players (2017-2018) Previous ranks: NR (2016), 75/80 (2018) Summary - Most of the letters of the alphabet are laid out in a row (street). When its your teams turn, you draw a card with a category (a profession) and then you (as a team) try to think of a word with a bunch of letters. Each use of a letter moves the corresponding letter on the street more toward your side. Move the letter enough spaces over and it becomes yours, no longer in contention. Experience - I love team games, party games, and word games. I didnt play WotS with a particularly bad group (in fact, am friends with them, though perhaps not my favorite to game with). And yeah, we managed to laugh a few times playing it. But well, lets just get right into the problems with the design. Design - Word on the Street fails for a few obvious reasons to me. The first is its genre. It falls under a bunch of categories I love, but the core mechanic of it is a vocabulary/spelling game. And that means that despite being a team game, it suffers from the the single best idea will win issue. Another is that, like Scrabble (not ranked, but that I dont enjoy), the funnest/cleverest word rarely is the best answer. The objectively best answers are the ones that muse the target letter(s) multiple times, and if possible, remove them in one go. There might be a little novelty in thinking these up the first time, but I just dont find it particularly fun or clever. And worse, the game can come down to a final few letters, where it becomes truly zero-sum - theres no theroetical upper bound on game length; you could just keep exchange words with 1 or 2 Ks or Vs in them for perpetuity. Its one of those games that gets considerably less fun as it goes on, which is a death knell for a party game. Future - This game seems to have been purged from the rotation so it wont come up more. I could stomach maybe one or two rounds a year, but the replay value is particularly low on this one, IMO. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness <cite>SeabassDebeste posted [p:932238090] in another ye... [t:78284791]...</cite> <quote>126. Word on the Street (2009) Category: Team vs Team Genres: Party game, word game, spelling Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0 Game length: 25-35 minutes Experience: 4-8 plays with 5-8 players (2017-2018) Previous ranks: NR (2016), 75/80 (2018) Summary - Most of the letters of the alphabet are laid out in a row (street). When its your teams turn, you draw a card with a category (a profession) and then you (as a team) try to think of a word with a bunch of letters. Each use of a letter moves the corresponding letter on the street more toward your side. Move the letter enough spaces over and it becomes yours, no longer in contention. Experience - I love team games, party games, and word games. I didnt play WotS with a particularly bad group (in fact, am friends with them, though perhaps not my favorite to game with). And yeah, we managed to laugh a few times playing it. But well, lets just get right into the problems with the design. Design - Word on the Street fails for a few obvious reasons to me. The first is its genre. It falls under a bunch of categories I love, but the core mechanic of it is a vocabulary/spelling game. And that means that despite being a team game, it suffers from the the single best idea will win issue. Another is that, like Scrabble (not ranked, but that I dont enjoy), the funnest/cleverest word rarely is the best answer. The objectively best answers are the ones that muse the target letter(s) multiple times, and if possible, remove them in one go. There might be a little novelty in thinking these up the first time, but I just dont find it particularly fun or clever. And worse, the game can come down to a final few letters, where it becomes truly zero-sum - theres no theroetical upper bound on game length; you could just keep exchange words with 1 or 2 Ks or Vs in them for perpetuity. Its one of those games that gets considerably less fun as it goes on, which is a death knell for a party game. Future - This game seems to have been purged from the rotation so it wont come up more. I could stomach maybe one or two rounds a year, but the replay value is particularly low on this one, IMO. --- yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness</quote> ... Copied to Clipboard!
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