I can’t play Letter Jam without thinking about other word games. Growing up, I played a lot of Scrabble. Both of my parents were teachers, and while they enjoyed playing games, the modern hobby hadn’t taken hold in the US yet. Like everyone else, the only games they purchased were mass produced games. And they were certain to have some sort of education based redeeming value – math, geography, spelling, general trivia, etc.
No Mousetrap in that household, that’s for sure.
So even at a young age, I would sit down with my parents and play the classic. They would, of course, let me “cheat”. I could look in the dictionary. They would give advice. They would let me move my words if there was a better placement. The point was to learn and grow and help me feel like I was achieving.
I hated Scrabble.
How is Qi a Word?!?!
On the periphery, it’s an imbalanced game. While the letter and point distribution is “balanced”, there is no getting around the fact that previous knowledge, both in word and in strategic play, greatly affect the outcome of the game.
Even with all that encouraging help from my parents, I would still lose. I’m not saying I was spoiled and wasn’t taught how to lose graciously. But at the end of the game, I would look silently at the board. I could see the two letter and vowelless antics of the adults and be left thinking “How can I compete against that?”
Letter Jam, designed by Ondra Skoupý and published by CGE, gets rid of that problem by turning Scrabble into a cooperative game that provides what Scrabble sorely lacks – empathy.
There is no getting around that there is a lot of set-up for this game. An exercise involving each player creating a five letter word, scrambling it, passing it to their left and then very carefully setting up a letter card so that everyone can see it, save the actual player. Trying to walk new people through this can be a test of patience and skill.
The goal is for each player to guess the word that they’ve been handed. But first they need to figure out what their secret letters are. Everyone learns that by giving clues to each other, in words, based off of the letters that they can see in front of them – everyone else’s but their own.
The players do this through truncated table talk. “I have a five letter word that helps 4 people.” Once the team decides on the clue giver, that player then place numbered chips, one in front of the letters used to make that word. This lets all players know the correct order of the letters, even though they can’t see them all.
It is here that the essence of the game resides. You don’t need to have a vast knowledge of complicated words to succeed. And giving only two or three letter words won’t help either. Also, the clues can’t be so simple that multiple letters could be a possibility.
I could see the two letter and vowelless antics of the adults and be left thinking “How can I compete against that?”
I C U R A Q T
For example, say you can clearly see the word MAST in front of you.
Player one would have the clue *AST, meaning that their letter can be one of six possibilities.
Player two sees M*ST, leading to just about every vowel except for E.
And so on and so forth.
So ”MAST” would not be a good clue in Letter Jam.
It is only when a player is confident that they think they know what their letter is that they can put it face down and move on to the next one. But, they never get to check if they are correct until the very end of the game.
It is this uncertainty that forces every player to hone their ability. They have to see how the puzzle looks to each of their fellow players and what benefits the most people. And the only reward they receive is “job well done.”
In other words, Empathy.
This also creates moments within the game that is honestly lacking from even the most cooperative games: the selfless positive feedback.
When a player gives a clue that benefits the group, it is not just the game that looks on you favorably by moving the game forward. Fellow players do as well. When you are clever in Scrabble, what you receive is just for you. Your cleverness benefits you and you alone, except for the few new letters you have placed on the board.
Unless, of course, you played completely strategic and made a New York Times crossword out of your tile placement.
The cleverer you are, the more selfish you are.
Yes, I realize Scrabble is a competitive game. Please refer to my childhood trauma described above.
Altruist The Game
Letter Jam gives players the opportunity to be clever for the benefit of the group. With the use of extra letters and higher scoring capabilities, Letter Jam takes care of the common but dreaded problem that plagues most cooperative games – the alpha player.
If you are confident in your letter, you move on to the next one. If not, don’t worry, you keep it and the next clue should, hopefully, help you figure it out.
When everyone feels like they know their letters, or the predetermind number of rounds have passed, they then try to guess what word the five letters make. Even though they are still unaware if they’ve guessed the letters correctly. If they are feeling particularly clever, they can also try to make a bigger word using letters from the play of the game.
The fact that I am skimming over both the beginning and ending of Letter Jam should tell you two things. One is that they are very hard to describe when not in person and not so intuitive. And two, that the real meat of the game is the actual game play. That’s where the focus is and that’s where it should remain.
The rules themselves highlight this by, interestingly, playing fast and loose with end game winning conditions and winning itself. The five letter word guessed at the end doesn’t have to be the original word intended. So even if somebody is wrong in their letters if, by some miracle, it spells out a word, you still get points.
Even when it comes to scoring, the section starts off with the sentence “If you like, you can count up your LetterJam score.”
The point is that the heart of Letter Jam is the clue giving and the puzzle solving. Everything else is the framework to provide that experience. In a rules-lawyer heavy hobby, this can be off putting for some. But like the red strawberry with a secret message on the cover, it can be quite refreshing.
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