Upwords

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UpWords
A finished Upwords game.
Designer	Elliot Rudell
Publisher	Hasbro Games
Players	2 to 4
Age range	10 years and up
Setup time	< 1 min
Playing time	45 to 90 minutes
Random chance	Medium
Skills required	Counting, Strategy, Vocabulary

Upwords is a board game invented by Elliot Rudell and published by Hasbro Games (a subsidiary of Hasbro). Upwords is similar to Scrabble, except that players can stack letters on top of other words to create new words. The higher the stack of letters (up to five) the more points are scored. This often makes words built in later turns of the game more valuable than earlier words, increasing play intensity. The game is available in about 20 languages. Hasbro, the worldwide license owner, has recently licensed electronic marketing rights to Microsoft, making it available electronically for the first time since AOL bought Games.com and ceased offering it.

[edit] Game play

Players draw letter tiles until they have seven tiles on their racks. The first player forms a word that covers one or more of the central squares. After forming a word, the player draws more tiles to replenish the rack. Play continues to the left. The subsequent plays may put tiles on the board and on top of tiles already played, so long as all words formed are found in the dictionary being used.

For example, if a word on the board is CATER, a player on a subsequent turn could put a B and E in front of CATER and then put an L on top of the C and a D on top of the R to build BELATED.

The game's scoring is well balanced in two senses:

Players get more points for words if all the letters are on the first board layer (2 points per tile).
They get more points as tiles get higher since they score for the tiles in their words and the tiles under their words (1 point per tile).

Since Upwords lacks bonus squares like Scrabble, there is an extra rule to keep people from capitalizing too much on other people's words. A play cannot consist solely of appending an S to a word to make it plural.

Originally, Upwords was played on an 8×8 square board, which many players felt to be cramped relative to Scrabble's 15×15 grid. Newer Upwords sets come with a 10×10 square board, which allows for much more comfortable play.

There have been national tournaments played in Hungary and Turkey.

Unlike Scrabble, which is controlled by competitors Hasbro (in the U.S.) and Mattel (in Europe), Upwords is at this time solely under the worldwide licensing control of Hasbro Games, making it the only such worldwide word game property that can be Internet-marketed and Internet-offered with complete licensing control.