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Alfa Beta

The game that has you hooked

The hooks in the game may easily have you hooked, because it works well. How? You are meant to catch most points and that is achieved with the longest possible words. The game features double-sided hooks, each hook carries a letter, 74 orange hooks show the normal, easy letters of value 1, 14 green hooks carry the somewhat more difficult letters of value 2 – B, F, G, H and K – and the red hooks provide the problematic letters of value 3 – C, J, P, Q, V, X, W and Z. The hooks showing an underscore are jokers for all other letters.

In turn, you think of a word, if possible with accessible letters only, take the first letter from the heap, hold the hook vertically and fish the next letter out of the heap with the lower part of the hook, and go on like this until you have formed a valid word. The letters must be hooked in the right order and also in the right orientation; if a letter is upside down, your turn ends and you do not score. Your turn also ends without score if a letter drops off. Letters you still hold are always put back. If you managed a valid word, you keep it for scoring in the end. Remember, you cannot shuffle the heap, you must make do with accessible letters.

When all letters have been taken or when no valid word can be formed with the remaining letters, you win with the highest score from the words you collected.

A creative variant of the make-words-out-of-letters games. Of course it gets more and more difficult, because letters go out of play, but you can maybe form shorter and more valuable words, because difficult letters are unlocked. Creativity, vocabulary and a steady hand are in demand and provide fun!

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Time: 25+

Designer: Dugald Keith

Artist: not named

Price: ca. 23 Euro

Publisher: Piatnik 2015

Web: www.piatnik.com

Genre: Word formation, dexterity

Users: For families

Version: multi

Rules: cz de fr hu it nl pl sk

In-game text:

Comments:

Marvelous game idea

Hooks are good to handle

Trains vocabulary and motor skills

Compares to:

Word forming games in general, first game of its kind

Other editions:

Currently none

Chance (pink): 0

Tactic (turquoise): 0

Strategy (blue): 0

Creativity (dark blue): 3

Knowledge (yellow): 2

Memory (orange): 0

Communication (red): 0

Interaction (brown): 0

Dexterity (green): 3

Action (dark green): 1