a.k.a. WRD GEM Game

Rules

My wife and I developed a twist on the Road Trip game “License Plates” and we play it with a bag of letter tiles (one hundred wooden tiles with letter frequencies similar to Scrabble that we customized to play Anagrams).

Each Round

1. Reach into bag and pick three letters in succession and set them out in a fixed ordering—order matters.

2. Start a timer for two minutes. You can change this to your liking but we recommend not tweaking it just because one player is struggling, unless you have a younger player who needs a handicap.

3. Two to Ten+ Players (limited only by how many people can sit at a table or see the letters) then sit quietly, with pen and paper, and write down words they think of, hidden from other players, scored according to the Scoring Rules, until the timer ends.

You can play as many or as few rounds per game as you like. You can write down as many words as you like, but unlike Boggle, you are not rewarded for the quantity of words, but for quality.

Scoring a Round

A preselected list of words should be agreed on and neither player can say, “That does not count as a word” at any point simply because the other player is familiar with a bogus-sounding word that they don‘t know offhand.

Two points are awarded each round, one for Longest Word, and one for Shortest Word. There are rules for breaking ties:

Longest Word

1. The word with the most letters wins.

2. For two words of the same length:

• The word that starts with the first letter in the triplet and ends with the last letter in the triplet wins, or if neither satisfy this:
• The word that starts with the first letter wins, or if neither satisfy this:
• The word that ends with the last letter of the triplet wins.
• For words that neither end nor begin with the first / last letter of the triplet, respectively (or for ties under rule #2):

3. Alphabetical: the word that comes earlier in the dictionary wins.

For ties (the same word) neither player gets a point.

Shortest Word

1. The word with the fewest letters wins (four or more).

2. For two words of the same length:

• The word that starts with the first letter in the triplet and ends with the last letter in the triplet wins, or if neither satisfy this:
• The word that starts with the first letter wins, or if neither satisfy this:
• The word that ends with the last letter of the triplet wins.
• For words that neither end nor begin with the first / last letter of the triplet, respectively (or for ties under rule #2):

3. Alphabetical: the word that comes earlier in the dictionary wins.

For ties (the same word) neither player gets a point.