#watchword

So Balatro came out a couple years ago, and it was good. The core elements (playing against a target score, shop between levels, boss levels with additional rules, points times mult, jokers or similar elements that drastically change the rules, etc.) are quite flexible and portable, and so a whole bunch of disparate game developers looked at the game and said "what if I made this with words instead of poker hands?" Which means that over the last year or so, we've had an entire little subgenre I'm obnoxiously labeling "Baletteros" (look, I could have gone with "Lettery Balatrolikes") crop up, but it also feels like everyone is reinventing the wheel every time (because they've all been in development in parallel and no one is really learning from anyone else). Anyway, for my own personal amusement, here are my thoughts on a bunch of these.

Wordatro

I think this one was the first on the scene, or at the very least, it was the first one I personally encountered. It sticks pretty close to the Balatro formula, with the big difference being that your plays aren't reset between levels (clearing a level earns you more plays but doesn't reset you to the baseline, so your total number of plays available on any specific encounter can fluctuate based on your performance).

Pros:

I really like the way that you end up modifying your spaces (first letter position, second letter position, etc.) over the run. To me, that's kind of the unique mechanic that makes Wordatro stand out from other Baletteros.

You're mostly rewarded for playing big fun words rather than tiny bullshit Scrabble words (you know, ZA and QAT and TE and other things that no English speaker actually uses), with some exceptions.

Decent difficulty scaling. I still haven't beaten the very hardest difficulty.

The deckbuilding element (adding letters to your pool and changing the letters in your pool) is pretty good, not a ton to say about that.

Cons:

Okay so the fatal flaw of Wordatro is that there's a god strategy. Like you can mess around with other strategies and get through the end, but if you want to get on the leaderboard, there's fundamentally one strategy to rule them all. I won't tell you what it is because if you actually play the game it's fun to find it yourself, but once you find it, it becomes painfully, thuddingly obvious that there's no other strategy that actually comes close to this one in terms of what gets you the actual big numbers, and then the game gets boring and becomes effectively a solved problem. (The hardest difficulty is hard mostly because you don't really have time to get this specific trick off the ground.)

Directly related to the above, the "jokers" aren't as varied as I'd really like them to be. A lot of them just kind of feel like trap options. There's still variety, but it doesn't take too long before you've kind of seen all the options the game offers.

Word Play

I like Word Play a lot. It gives you a 4x4 grid of tiles, so you've always got a lot of letters to pick from without really worrying about getting extra draws or dealing with significant hand limitations. It's less explicit about the points-times-mult mechanic, but you also will not succeed at the higher levels if you aren't getting multipliers involved.

Pros:

Absolutely no reliance on tiny bullshit Scrabble words.

I really like the challenge perks that scale up as you play words with specific characteristics, go down when you play other words, and then just lock when you've hit the max. That's a fun game element, adds a good risk-reward balance.

No hand management. It's just a big pile of letters every time.

Cons:

Not a ton of variety (no unique modes or challenges).

The various letter upgrades aren't especially balanced. Many of them just don't do a whole lot even if you try to build for them.

Birdigo

Birdigo pissed me the hell off. It's basically the same thing as Wordatro, but everything feels constrained. Your hand size is very limited, your deck isn't very flexible, and it's easy to get hand-screwed. My golden rule for challenging games is that if a game convinces me that it was MY fault that I lost, I will let it kick my ass all day long and sign up for more (Hollow Knight and Silksong are basically my favorite games ever, if that tells you anything), but when the game makes me feel like there was nothing I could have done? I'm out. This game breaks that rule and makes it feel like there was nothing I could have done when I lose, so it's a bad game in my book.

Cursed Words

Cursed Words is probably my favorite entry in the genre so far. It's different from the others in that it's a word search game rather than a hand-of-tiles game, so just because the letters are on the board doesn't mean you can use them if they're not in the right order. Its real gimmick is the "curses" on its tiles; some of them are "like normal letters but they activate different effects" (cards, currencies), but a lot of them are "wildcards that obey completely different rules" (numbers/fractions, chess pieces, items, wobbly letters). It has a completely absurd dictionary, and by the end of a lot of runs you're throwing eight or nine or ten wildcards together with a handful of normal letters and letting the game come up with some completely bonkers word that you "meant." (This is diegetic in-universe, by the way. The little guy is all "uh, did you mean _____ instead?")

Pros:

Tons of characters with unique core mechanics and who all feel very different

Lots of interesting unique challenge quests, most of which are fun and only a few of which are bullshit

Rewards both knowing lots of words and also being willing to surrender to chaos and just play for points rather than for words

Cons:

Most of the stickers (joker equivalents) are useful in at least some situations, but when you unlock enough of them (and there are about a billion of them), it's kind of easy to get late-game runs where there's basically no coherence in the shop and you just kind of get shop-screwed

I go back and forth over whether I love the song or hate it

Likes being coy about its mechanics and forcing you to experiment to discover them, which is honestly both good and bad

Lexispell

I was seriously disappointed with this one. It's basically like most of the others; the thing that's slightly different is that instead of being in a hand or a grid, your letters are jumbled up in a cauldron and if you overflow the cauldron by asking for too many extra letters then you're in trouble. There's a very small physics-based element where the letters merge with each other, but to be honest, it's quite opaque and doesn't seem to be something you can really intentionally incorporate into the game. There are multiple "characters" but they feel close enough to identical mechanically that there's no point. Worst of all, the UX is absolute garbage; it's full of bugs that make the controls impossible, or that delete your reserved letters if you go back to the title screen (save and quit, for example), or that cause your cursor to simply disappear. The one upside is that there's a time-pressure mode, and while that's not really my jam, it's mostly unique so far, so that's a little bit new. Overall not worth it imo though.

Watchword

I really want to like Watchword. It feels like an excellent proof-of-concept that deserves a full game. (It's nominally a full game, but it kind of doesn't feel like one.) It's kind of Scrabble-like in that you're putting letters crisscross on a grid, but explicitly un-Scrabble in that the minimum word length is three, so you can't just slap together a bunch of inscrutable two-letter "words" that no human being has ever actually said out loud.

Pros:

Interesting draw mechanic. You get a certain number of initial draws of six letters each and then a certain number of additional draws after each score. When you draw, you clear all the letters in your draw tray, but any letters you've placed on the grid stick around and can be moved. You only have a limited number of discards to get rid of tiles you no longer want, so there's a fun risk/reward element.

Each level has a different rule attached based on the "guard" you're trying to get past, adding a bit of variety within a run.

Your board size expands over the run, causing your strategy to evolve.

One of the few games in this vein that allows multiple letters on a single tile, which is fun.

Cons:

Serious lack of staying power. There's only a small number of difficulty levels, and while there are different "bags" to unlock that change your baseline rules, the changes they make aren't big enough to drastically alter your playstyle, so once you've seen a few runs you've seen everything the game has to offer. (There's way more books--your joker equivalents--to unlock than there are unique runs to unlock them in.)

Okay, this is petty, but the aesthetic is just this paper-thin thing that honestly makes me feel like they shouldn't have even bothered. Like, your upgrades come from various NPCs, but they all have the exact same random dialogue in this super shallow "we're scholars and we like books" vein. It's honestly a little weird and off-putting compared to just sticking it in a void like Balatro or Word Play.

Beyond Words

I'm kind of mad at how much I'm enjoying this one? It's explicitly Scrabble-based, i.e., you're arranging words on a grid so that they intersect with each other (rather than spelling words into a vacuum one at a time). And like, generally Scrabble is a major annoyance to me because I feel like it's built around bullshit letter combinations rather than Actual Goddamn Words, but somehow this game still feels good to me because it's got SO much Balatro DNA that it does feel more like Balatro than like Scrabble.

Pros:

Of the games I've discussed here, this adheres probably the most strongly to Balatro's game mechanics. We've got very explicit points and mult, we've got upgrading the base points and mult on specific word lengths the way Balatro upgrades different poker hands, we've got modifications to your power cards (jokers) to how they affect points/mult, we've got booster cards that basically act just like tarot cards, and overall it does feel like you're playing Balatro more than Scrabble (but still spelling words).

Three general kinds of levels (and each level is basically an entire run of nine challenges): general, special, and timed. Special levels have unique rules and timed levels have, well, a time limit. Even the general levels still feel very different from each other because the board layout and (especially) the tile set change drastically, so there's a ton of variety between runs.

Cons:

Okay, it is still Scrabble though, and to thrive you still need to have the ability and willingness to string together horrible little two- and three-letter combinations that, sorry not sorry, Aren't Fucking Words, and then you're dealing with space management as much as with trying to make words.

The game isn't very up-front about how purple tiles work, namely that a purple wildcard (or other tile worth zero) will, instead of just failing to contribute to your score (as expected for a wildcard), will actually zero out your score for a given word, and will keep doing so if it's used in future words. I've had multiple runs hosed because of this and it felt like a real cheap shot.

The shop reroll mechanic is weirdly punishingly expensive, so if you don't like what's for sale in the first offer, you might be going hungry, and unless you manage to get the bonus for clearing your rack, even by the second or third challenge, having no power cards (or no power cards that meaningfully contribute to score) will really hose you.

Watchword & Andrew Kirschner - Tour 2014

Mistake by the Lake Tapes