Word up! (Hasbro Upwords)

Member Name: bamamo

Product:	Hasbro Upwords
Date:	12/01/09 (91 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to master, more of the "easy" letters makes play flow well, fun

Disadvantages: The stickers you have to apply yourself make the game feel a bit cheaper, no bag for letters

My mum and I enjoy playing board games, and in particular like a game of Scrabble. So when we saw Upwords on sale in an outlet decided to give it a try as it's a similar premise, in fact I believe in the States at least it is called Scrabble Upwords.


HOW TO PLAY
After selecting 7 tiles, each player must choose a letter and the player closest to A begins. The first turn must cover at least one of the central red squares. Very Scrabble-like so far.

However the difference is that for every word you play of one "layer" you get 2 points per letter, and those with several layers get one point per letter. You also get two extra points for using the rarer letters - Z, X, V, J and Qu, of which there are only one each in the set. You can lay a new word where there's room as long as every word it intersects with is valid. You can also change an existing word by adding a tile on top of a letter - for example changing the word THIN to THAN by adding an A.

Because multi-layered plays only get one point per letter it's sometimes not worth going down that route, but as the board becomes full you can really cash in once the towers get higher. You can't stack more than five letters, and as long as the tiles you add are all in the same word, you can sometimes change two or three words at a time if you play skilfully, getting the points for all of these words.

Unlike Scrabble, plurals aren't allowed unless they are part of a new word in another direction, but you can easily sponge off your opponent's moves by altering a letter to high towers!

When you run out of tiles, or none of the players can move, the points are added up, with five points per tile remaining unused deducted from the player's score.

Upwords is a game for 2-4 players and for the two-player games I participated in, they mostly took around 30-45 minutes to complete.


QUALITY AND FEEL OF THE GAME
While the board itself and tiles are well made, we were a little puzzled as to why we had to affix red stickers to the central spaces and "Upwords" labels to each side. This did cheapen the feel overall, surely it wouldn't have been too difficult to print that directly onto the board?

The board does have feet, which was appreciated as when the towers begin to get a bit higher, you do need to move the board around a bit to see what letter is hiding behind, so our table wasn't going to get damaged. It also means that the pieces won't go flying if you knock into it as it should stay put.

The one addition I think would have been welcome would be a bag to put the letters in. The instructions say to lay them upside down on a table top, but this takes some time to set up and surely it would be easier to fish them out of a bag, and make it easier to store them without any going astray. We ended up putting them inside a little gift bag left over from Christmas!


VERDICT
I really enjoyed the game and won by miles which I don't usually in Scrabble, but Mum prefers the traditional two dimensional game (probably because she lost!). The beginning of the game is quite slow with lower scores, but once you get towards the end you can pick some pretty decent points.

The board is smaller than a Scrabble board, and of the 100 letters there are less of the "nasties" such as X, J, Y etc. As a result we found ourselves with really good words but nowhere to play them because the board was full.

What I did like is that even though your opponent might play a move where you were wanting to go, this doesn't always stop you from playing over the top of it. I hate getting a good word spoiled and sometimes it takes me a while to think of a move in Scrabble, but Upwords flowed pretty freely.

The game suggests it is for age 9 up. Obviously how well you play depends on how wide your vocabulary is, but I do think younger players would need a particularly kind opponent for it not to be a total walkover.

I had a lot of fun playing Upwords and prefer it to Scrabble now as it just adds a dimension to a game I already like - literally!


PRICE AND AVAILABILITY
We bought our copy of the game from The Works for £4.99. You can find the game at Amazon for £9.17 at the time of writing, so this is one of the cheaper board games as they are, I find, as a whole pretty darn expensive! This is a fairly popular game and I shouldn't think you would have any trouble finding it for under a tenner on the high street or online.

Summary: A fun 3D word game which Scrabble fans would enjoy.