If you regular the site, you may or may not have noticed my submission of "Captcha Capture" for the BGDS in December. I had so much fun working on the rules and LIKED the rules I made, that I started working on a prototype. I bought craft sticks and used P3 acrylic, white primer to paint the sticks as specified in my rules. The paint has a bit of an odor but it's faint and you can only smell it if you put your nose up to it. The white compliments the black lettering and better represents Captcha in this sense. On the other hand, the Scrabble pieces are wooden, as well as the tile holders. I feel that it would be more stylish if I were to leave the wood craft sticks unpainted and have everything match. Normally, the game was supposed to be played 1 player at a time, but after playing Scategories on Friday, having everyone play together AND fight over letters is MUCH more fun. Over the past few weeks, I've been purchasing the items for the game. I just need 1 more stamp set to have 3 different alphabet fonts to really mess with players' eyes. I think I'll playtest it on Saturday with my gaming group and take pictures and video. Hell, if they like it and I get all the kinks out of the rules (if there ARE any), I might just throw it up on BGG. I shortened the name to "Captcha", but I don't think the name really fits anymore. I need a new name for this...
Rundown of Costs
• $1 - 2min Sand Timer
• $1 - 3min Sand Timer
• $8 - Alphabet Stamp Set (Coupon)
• $6 - Alphabet Stamp Set (Coupon)
• $2 - Cardboard Pencil Box (To Store Game)
• $3 - Jumbo Craft Sticks (75)
• $3 - Jumbo Craft Sticks (300) (Coupon)
• $15 - Scrabble Board Game
Still Need to Purchase
• Alphabet Stamp Set
• Ink Pad
• Larger Storage Box
Comments
Letter Frequency
If the information on wikipedia is a good source, then both the letter frequency and point value of Scrabble pieces are not reflective of all the words in the English language. However, since you will be creating all the words, I imagine you'll have a lot of control over how well the letters to draw from match the letters in the targets. I am assuming though that the number of words will exceed the number of letters so that people can play a number of rounds and that the time limit will make it so that there are a lot of left over pieces. So the over letter availability and requirements will regress toward the mean for the English language. So, in constructing the draw pile out of scramble pieces you might keep the difference between scrabble and English in mind.
Otherwise, it sounds like it could be a fun little party game... provided that people aren't too vicious. What do you think about giving each person their own pile or using some face down rule (pieces must be chosen and/or returned face down) to make each person as careful as he wants to be.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Exactly what I was thinking. I might take out a few vowels. To make it 4 players, all the tiles are going to be face down. Each player flips over tiles, one at a time, and takes them as they need them. When finished, that player puts his tiles back down and shuffles them Mah-Jong style.