Pyramid Magazine
Andy Vetromile
April 2005
USA

A lot of recent releases from Out of the Box Publishing have included plenty of gewgaws and seemingly unnecessary bits of equipment. While nice, these extras (a la Whad'Ya Know?'s bobble-head and Easy Come, Easy Go's dice cup) usually served only to boost the cost and not necessarily the playability of games that could already be satisfying enough in their own right. LetterFlip is one of their most impressive kits to date as far as gadgets, but this time it looks like the extras are well worth the price tag.

The object of the game is to be the first person to guess all four of his words.

The game comes with two letterflippers. These are panels reminiscent of laptops, and they have the alphabet on tiles that flip up and down. Each player gets a card with four words, to be guessed by their opponent, which they slip into a slot along the side of their panel. Only one word is visible at a time, and players start with their three-letter words. They take turns trying to guess the letters in their word; if they guess wrong, they can eliminate that letter by flipping the corresponding tile face-down and the other player gets to guess. If they guess correctly, they pull a little tab out of that letter tile that shows how many times the letter appears in the word -- for example, if the word is "too" they would pull the tab up to show that "O" appears twice.

If a player has all the right letters from the word but can't unscramble them, they may ask a letter's position: "Is the first letter in my word 'A'?" Again, a correct answer lets you go again. If you suss out your three-letter word, you continue your turn by guessing letters in the four-letter word. This continues until someone has uncovered the five- and six-letter words as well, winning the game.

The equipment that comes in your box not only looks good but is useful and fun to fiddle with. The letterflippers are about 6" by 9" and maybe half an inch deep. They have three rows of letters that flip up and down; these can occasionally come loose, though they pop back in easily. They also may slip down when you touch them -- they don't tend to just fall over on their own, but if you fuss with them or are too fumble-fingered, they'll take that as a hint and drop. Each letter has a tab with little star symbols that extends from the back. These are used to show how many of each letter occur in your current word (and by clicking one star into view, you keep those tiles distinct from letters you simply haven't yet guessed). There is also a letter count flipper that, instead of stars, displays numbers three through six on its tab as a remember of which word you're working on. Under all of this is the slot for your opponent's card, with a little window that shows which word he's working on.

It all seems a bit involved, and perhaps there's not much to recommend it over a simple game of Hangman, but you can take these devices just about anywhere, and the word cards give players a distinct, identifiable goal -- no arguments over what does and doesn't "count" or what can be used. What could have been troublesome gear is actually in good shape, and kids will certainly be thrilled playing with these gizmos. It's easy to play adult against youngster, since the word cards have color-coded standard and advanced sides. The categorizations are on-target, too. Standard three-letter words include fairly mundane things like "ear" and "bed," while advanced has "rye" and "flu." At the top end, words like "pillow" face off against "velvet." And yet, for those who think the old Wheel of Fortune gambit ("R, S, T, L, N, E . . . ") is going to work: You're going to lose a lot of games.

The box is packed, there's no wasted space, and Out of the Box has thought to include everything but pencil and paper. Even the card decks have a place in the molded plastic insert, with the words "draw" and "discard" stamped on the insert so you remember which end is which. (A pair of divider cards show when it's time to reshuffle the decks.) Like a game of Battleship for the intellectual set, LetterFlip has all the elements of a classic family favorite: easy to learn, accessible to all ages, fun to play, and colorful . . . and it doesn't hurt to sneak a little learnin' in on them, either.

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