Base price: $38.
2 – 4 players.
play time: 30 – 45 minutes.
BGG Link
<a href="https://www.fowers.games/products/typewriter” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Buy directly!
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Typewriter was provided by Fowers games.
It’s always nice to spend a week playing games from my favorite publishers, and while there are plenty, Fowers games and Saashi & Saashi consistently get me, so it’s been a breeze playing the games and getting them reviewed. Or at least the play and the photography part have been easy; I’ve been slowing my writing to almost a crawl the last few weeks. Something about a holiday and me deserving a break, but my boss (also me) is a real stickler and won’t even give me Christmas off. Oh well. Let’s dig into Typewriter! New from Fowers games.
In Typewriter, deckbuilding is a thing of the past thanks to this click-clacky new tool you’ve gotten. It has keys, you see, and you can use those to build even better words, provided you’re okay switching it up every now and then. So type and type and carriage return to build better words with better keys and see where it all ends up! Will you be able to out-write your competitors?
Contents
Setup
Few different types of tokens in play. The starter tokens are given first; each player gets four and chooses two to flip to the ? side:
The Common Vowels (and Common Wild) are shuffled into a stack with the Common Wild on bottom, then set by the Temporary Wilds:
The remainder of the tokens go in the bag; each player draws three and keeps two, standard-side up:
Give each player a board (they can use the alternate side for player-specific abilities):
Shuffle the Event cards and place nine in a stack, setting the rest aside.
You should be ready to start! Give each player a Meter Token to set on the 0, and draw four tokens out of the bag to form the Offer.
Gameplay
Decently straightforward game! Spell the best words over nine rounds to gain the ability to bank and star tokens. You’ll need to do both; there is no other way to score points. Just keep in mind that banking your best keys can hurt your spending power!
Start a round by flipping an Event card and applying its effect if possible.
First thing you’ll do on your turn is spell a word using as many of the keys in your pool as you want and the Common Vowel, if you’d like. Use an agreed-upon dictionary.
Once you’ve spelled a word, check its value. Each key has a number greater than or equal to 1 (or no number if it’s 0), and that value is what it contributes to your Meter. Advance your Meter equal to the word’s total value. Your Meter cannot exceed 30. You may also use abilities on keys that show abilities; they’re considered part of your Word, but they don’t provide Meter Value and don’t count as extra letters.
After your word has been spelled, you can drain your Meter completely (resetting to 0) to use up to three effects: one of each color, provided they are on spaces equal to or below your Meter’s value. This means if you’re at 30 you can use an orange ability, a purple ability, and a green ability; less, you may only be able to use a green and a purple or just a green. Some abilities affect your Word, and some affect your Pool; your Pool is any letters not in your Word. Some abilities let you add keys from your Word to your Bank; once they’re in your Bank, they’re unlikely to come back out. You can also use abilities to Star keys in your Bank; they’ll be worth (usually) even more points. More on that later. If you spell a word that’s 9+ letters (as some keys have multiple letters on them), you immediately Bank the topmost Common Vowel. You cannot Bank or Star the Common Wild.
Moving on, you then take a key from the Offer and add it to your Pool. Once you’ve done so, flip every key in your Word to the other side and add them back to your Pool as well. Then it’s the next player’s turn.
After nine rounds, the game ends! Players total the value on keys in their Bank and add in the value and the number of stars on keys in their Star area. The player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Again, relatively minor ones on this one. The major places that other players can get in your business are really pulling keys from the Offer and taking Common Vowels, but even those aren’t going to be terribly critical. Sure, certain keys might mess up your long-term plans or losing a few Common Vowels might force you to change the exact word you were coming up with, but that’s going to happen no matter the player count. There’s a lot you can do with what you get on your turn, so it doesn’t feel like quite as big of a deal as it could be. I wouldn’t say it feels like big shifts in player counts amount to much in this game, though the thing to watch out for is if you have an entire game of players who take forever to form words. Then, the game will slow to a crawl no matter how many players you have.
Strategy
- The more keys, the better, generally speaking. Having a big pool means you can spell longer words and, generally, longer words improve your Meter and let you access more abilities faster. Plus, then you have a wider array of keys you can Bank or Star without consequences. Just make sure you don’t go overboard; you can end up with so many keys that you can’t really process any words and then you just stare at your pool for too long while the other players get annoyed. Not so much a strategic issue as it is a metagaming one.
- Don’t forget to Bank and Star keys! If you do, you’ll get zero points, and as it turns out, zero points is bad. That’s a What’s Eric Playing? Top Strategy Advice Pick right there; you’re welcome, chums.
- Just … don’t Bank your most valuable keys straight away. If you get rid of your highest-value keys too quickly, you’ll be left with a bunch of 1s and you’ll have to slowly move your meter up each turn in game-induced agony. Ask me how I know. Nonetheless, that’s a bit of an edge case, so just focus on getting a few useful keys into your Bank every so often, and then Starring the ones that have actual Stars on them, since the Stars are bonus points.
- Look for synergies and useful combos. There are keys that let you Bank or Star for free, for instance, or keys that give you Temporary Wilds so that you can immediately dunk a Common Vowel into your Bank (and then, with the right keys, Star that Common Vowel). Look for those and try to set things up! Also a useful combo is trying to desynchronize your wilds. They start desynchronized, in that two are wild while the other two aren’t, but some plays can cause you to have four consonants one turn and four wilds the next turn, and that’s not … ideal, usually. Figuring it out is a bit of a flow issue, so try to balance that where you can.
- Try to get to nine-letter words as fast as you can. First one there takes a Common Vowel, and that’s usually a bunch of (Star) points! Note that Banking it isn’t really enough; they really show their worth once they’re Starred. There are other, more valuable keys, but these can be banked for free with sufficiently long words, and that’s great.
- You can’t really affect other players too much beyond taking the Common Vowel. It’s not really worth looking at someone’s pool and figuring out which letter you taking will mess with them the most. You could play like that, but usually we all know what letter you’re going to take from the Offer once it’s drawn. At least, my group usually plays somewhat open in that regard. This isn’t really a game for messing with players, though getting the Common Vowel changed can mess with some players’ plans. It’s usually pretty minor.
- Wilds are pretty useful, though they usually don’t help much with your Meter. You could have an entire word made of wilds, but honestly I usually use them to scaffold the two-letter keys since they’re usually valuable. Plus, who doesn’t want to spell the word EXCORIATE? It rules and it uses an X. All wilds is good; using wilds to set up high-value and long words is better.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Typewriters are fun! So that’s always nice. I think I’ve kind of always wanted one in a retro-vibe sense, though I might just get the LEGO one and call it a day.
- I’ve been making fun of Tim for giving into “the man” and putting his games in normal-shaped boxes, but this is much easier to store on my shelves. Back in my day, he used to make these weird rectangular prisms that barely fit anywhere and now he seems to have settled down after Paperback Adventures and Sabotage and started making normie boxes for normie gamers. I respect that it was never a cylinder, Tim; cylindrical game boxes are the devil’s work.
- Love a word game. Still one of my all-time favorite genres; nothing’s more fun than making words, I guess? Not sure why; it might be the crossword kid in me.
- Nine rounds is a nice number, even if it feels like one of those numbers I jokingly say “was definitely playtested”. I always joke that if a number isn’t “obvious” (some weird multiple of 12 since 2 * 3 * 4) then it was probably playtested to death. 9 is definitely one of those numbers, though I’ve seen more egregious ones; I think I played a game once where you needed to add 14 to a number for some reason? Love a bit of playtest patching.
- I like the flexibility that having a pool of flipping tokens provides; it feels more flexible than a standard deckbuilder, even though they’re very different games. I think it’s that you always have access to half of your tokens, even if they’re not necessarily the half you want, as opposed to having a random hand of cards that might not be anything you want? There are also generally more tokens in your pool than there would be in a (normal) hand of cards.
- There’s a nice number of ways to increase complexity if you’re looking for that kind of thing. You can use the player-specific boards (which have their own powers and specializations) or you can play with extra points for having keys with certain colors face-up in your Pool at the end of the game. Love a little bit of configurability in my games.
- Pretty approachable! Also, the first game I’ve played with my Dad in years that he’s specifically mentioned enjoying. Every time my Dad asks me if I want to play a board game I ask him if he’s serious and then I pull out one of the 15ish games I have on me at any given time. It’s a weird interaction, but do we ever have “normal” interactions with our parents? I appreciate him humoring me, but we actually had a pretty good time playing this one! He specifically told me that he enjoyed it, which was … new. So that’s nice, worth mentioning here. I think he reads these sometimes; hi Dad!
- I really like that there’s no explicit way to score points without Banking or Starring keys. Except for that Color Combo thing, but that’s a variant so it doesn’t explicitly count. I just like that there’s some legitimate fear and peril that you might, through a lack of attentiveness, score absolutely nothing during a game. Very funny.
Mehs
- Who among us didn’t just dump all the tokens into the bag before realizing the Common Vowels, Starter Tokens, and standard Tokens were … different? I’d love to lie to you and say this didn’t happen but I was like “red tokens in the bag, blue tokens in the bag, yellow tokens in the bag, green tokens in the bag, gray tokens in the bag; doneski” and then I read the rulebook and had to dump the bag back out and fish the tokens out. I really like that the Mehs section has largely become “This Weird Experience I Had Playing This game” and it’s only sometimes bad; it’s usually just weird. Thank you, dear reader, for letting me use this in lieu of therapy. (…so I can talk to my therapist about other things.)
Cons
- While I love the “no points unless you’ve Banked or Starred”, it’s definitely worth emphasizing that to players. There are a couple key rules that are decently easy to miss. That’s the major one, and a lot of players struggle with the distinction between Word and Pool for Banking, Starring, and Flipping. I generally recommend that the most experienced player go first to demonstrate what a turn can look like to avoid a few of these things, and honestly, if you’re the most experienced player, work with new players; the most important thing about a game is that everyone has fun.
Overall: 8.25 / 10
Overall, I think Typewriter is another solid word game in the Paperback (and adjacent) family! I like the spin that this puts maneuvering the game from a deckbuilding game to a pool-building game, and the tradeoffs there are interesting. Stuck with a letter you don’t want to use? Well, you better figure out how to use it so that you can flip it or you’ll be stuck with a useless token in your pool forever. It’s a nice companion game to Paperback. Some of the strategies will carry over, but not all, and I like that sort of thing. Teaching people deckbuilding for their first try of it can be complicated. This is simple. The one place where players might get tripped up is honestly my favorite part of the game; I love that you don’t score unless you abandon your highest-value letters to your Bank or your Star area. I think that’s clever! It’s a reverse of the classic deckbuilding “points are junk” problem and much closer to the Dale of Merchants vibe where my best cards are integral to being removed from my deck. It means I have to be more thoughtful about the timing of removing tokens from my pool for good, and it’s even harder if I want to have a token flipped to a specific side so that it scores more points. It’s a clever bit of strategic fluidity that you need to be okay with in order to do well, and I love that kind of thing. Typewriter manages to combine all of these disparate elements into a fun and approachable word game that’s a great introduction to the -building genres of games, as well! I’m a fan, and if you’re looking for a fun word game, a solid pool-builder, or you just think typewriters are neat, I’d recommend Typewriter! I’ve quite liked it.
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