This might shock you, but I don’t actually love big words. Rather than elbowing pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into a conversation, I prefer short, evocative slashes to anything my readers might need to sound out. Let’s be real for a second: Did you actually say the word in the previous sentence, or did you blip over it like one more nickname for Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment? Exactly.

Five-Dollar Words, then, is a game that I am unexpectedly terrible at. Designed by Amabel and Mary Holland as the freebie for this year’s Hollandays Sale, it peddles itself as a game for sesquipedalianists and pedants. Better yet, it has a rule that prevents anybody from dragging out antidisestablishmentarianism as their word of choice.

Uh oh.

“I’m stuck thinking in five letters,” my mother-in-law said about two minutes into our first round. Unlike the recent spate of word games, Five-Dollar Words positively revels in length. Rarity, too, with stubborn letters like J, Q, and Z earning an extra point apiece.

A robust vocabulary also doesn’t go amiss. That’s due to the unbreakable structuring demanded by each splay. Each round begins with three letter cards being placed on the table. Their order matters. That’s because you need to find a word that uses those letters in that exact sequence. Sure, there can be other letters in between, even those same letters. An opening splay of E, P, and F, for instance, could become CREAMPUFF. And before you try to pluralize it, the Hollands have preempted you with a rule that any S at the end of a word is not worth anything.

Further, there’s a bonus to consider. Each card also shows a type — noun, adjective, verb — and your score will double if your word fits. These points are valuable, easily reaching into the 20s or 30s per word. But there are other wrinkles at hand. If two people guess the same word — and differing tenses or plurals qualify as the same word — then neither player is allowed to double their score. Which is a big deal, because, you know, doubling your score translates into quite a few points.

Almost as many points as claiming a card for yourself. In addition to a letter and a type, every card also boasts a suit. Collected sets are worth additional points when the game wraps up. Quite a few points, as it happens.

Are these all words? I hope so.

This being a free game, certain structural rules are left up to the group. Are players permitted to deliberate indefinitely? Should there be a time limit after Geoff realizes he can spend twenty minutes mulling over as much vocabulary as he pleases? Is it unfair to ban proteins from the dictionary when two of your players are biologists? What, exactly, constitutes a word? Linguistic prescriptivists and descriptivists may come to blows, especially when a tie produces a round with two cards up for the taking instead of only one.

On the whole, though, it’s a logophile’s exercise that doesn’t cap out at five or seven letters, but instead lets players flex their brains and vocabularies to produce words that wouldn’t fit into the hobby’s usual boundaries. This isn’t to call it unapproachable, so much as to say it’s a game that doesn’t bother to keep everyone on the same page. Runaway victories abound. Then again, that’s also a peril of Scrabble.

HML.

The result is a lovely little thing. It doesn’t carry the infinite appeal of last year’s freebie, Watch Out! That’s a Dracula!, a game I played throughout the year and intend to continue playing until they plant me. But what does?

Nothing. That’s what. But some games come closer than others. For a near-microgame, Five-Dollar Words has big things on its mind. Gigantic things. Colossal things. Brobdingnagian things.

(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi.)

A complimentary copy was provided.