Back when I was in the dating pool — the late Pleistocene, oh ho ho — I would sometimes tell women that my only qualification for a life partner was somebody I could “play boggle in bed” with. This was, of course, a euphemism for playing Bill Cooke and Allan Turoff’s 1972 word-making board game Boggle. While atop a bed. Because beds are cozy. And let me tell you, that joke goes so much harder among people who don’t play so many board games that they immediately assume that’s what I meant by “Boggle” in the first place.

Amabel Holland’s cross4 falls into the category of retro word games. Like Boggle, I suppose. Frankly, I would rather play Boggle. Which perhaps isn’t a ding against cross4 so much as it is a statement about how great Boggle is.

Writing a crossword.

cross4 is a crossword-making game. Actually, cross4 is four crossword-making games. In each, the basics remain untouched. You roll a septet of dice that show various letters. Then you take those letters — some or all, it’s up to you — and assign them to the blank spaces of a crossword puzzle. Making a word is a must. Making a good, obscure, or interesting word is optional. Actually, making good, obscure, or interesting words is probably one of the surest ways to fail.

The details change depending on the specific variant of cross4 currently being played. There’s Solitaire, where your objective is solely to score lots of points. There’s the Heads-Down varietal, where everybody labors over their own grid until someone makes a fatal mistake. The most interesting modes are Two-Player Duel and Elimination, both of which lean into the format’s natural idiosyncrasies. Basically, at regular intervals, everybody swaps grids. This transforms cross4 from a relatively straightforward affair into the sort of game where you can lay traps. Oh, and write good, obscure, or interesting words that your fellow players might struggle to use. Then again, such flippant play might come around to bite you in the hindquarters.

I mention idiosyncrasies. This game has plenty of them. Like the sprawling crossword space, with its multiple grid-spanning openings that are a real PITA to bridge. Or that issue’s compounding factor, the fact that there are seven dice, not quite enough to actually span such wide gaps, necessitating that players first build out a few shorter words. Planning ahead is a must, but planning ahead is hard as hell. And I say that as somebody who likes crossword-making games.

No less idiosyncratic, but far less confounding, are the dice themselves. Printed off-center and slightly scuffed, these rounded hexahedrons are the perfect imitation of what one might discover in an old copy of — well, in an old copy of Boggle. They feel like something you’d uncover in a grandparent’s game closet, although they’re tuned in a way that many old letter-dice games were not. For one thing, you’re actually guaranteed at least one vowel per roll.

But it’s not their tuning, but their sheer power as forgeries that make them stand out. Did Holland roll them through sand to achieve the optimal degree of rasp? Did she instruct her printer to make sure some of the bubbles were printed that crucial millimeter off center? They aren’t even quite the same size. In the era of machine-milled cellulose sponge, that’s more impressive than total uniformity. I hope it doesn’t come across as too dismissive to say that I’m tempted to keep the dice and chuck the game.

The dice are scuffed, miscut, and off-center. Exactly as they should be.

Dismissive or not, that’s my feeling here. Playing cross4, it was hard to shake off its redolence to another nostalgia-laden project: UFO 50, the 2024 collection of video games created in part by Hot Streak, Spots, and Scape Goat designer Jon Perry. Setting aside their obvious differences in scale, UFO 50 also adopted the limitations of an older format, in its case the systems, graphics, and inputs of 8-bit video games, in order to create something that was recognizably displaced in time, but also gifted the advantages of modern design principles. The result in that case was many things. Throwback archaeology. A meditation on the swift passage of video game tech. Even a bit of a flex for some of today’s most talented game creators.

With cross4, Holland does something similar. The rather large distinction, though, is that cross4 is a bijou, a displaced trinket, which evokes time-worn aesthetics and sensibilities, makes a few small corrections to how many of these games were busted right out of the box, but then settles into a series of games that are, at best, fine. To keep up the comparison to UFO 50, it’s more Block Koala than Party House.

The short version is that cross4 comes across as more of a vanity project than as something most people are liable to seek out, but I can’t deny that many of its smaller touches charmed me nonetheless. The grid-swapping modes, for example, and how they transform the gameplay from pure frustration to an ever-evolving minefield, or the way the rules are printed on the back of the box rather than afforded a booklet, or the dice. Above all, the dice. To handle them is to remember something we played long ago. It was not a very good game, but we sprawled on our bellies atop shag carpets, and the house smelled of stew and dog hair, and the television was always somehow tuned to 24-hour Matlock.

Which is to say, thanks for the memories, cross4. As for the crosswords… eh.

A complimentary copy of Cross4 was provided by the publisher.

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