Letter Jam

11th September 2021 

Wogglecon was drawing to a close and the final game of the day was co-operative word-puzzler Letter Jam.

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What's in a game?

• Letter cards: This deck of 65 cards displays 1 letter per card. Not ever letter from the alphabet is present, 'J', 'Q', 'V', 'X' & 'Z' are not used.
• Wildcard... card: The wildcard card can be used as any letter.
• Setup cards: These cards hold clue tokens and are stylised to look like flowers.
• Clue tokens: These translucent little acrylic discs come in bright green and bright  red.
• Numbered Tokens: Numbered from 1 to 8.
• Standees: Used to hold a single letter card.
• Guessing sheets: Players use these paper sheets to track info acquired through play.

The cards are the standard quality that you'd expect, as are the study acrylic tokens are study components. While the numbered tokens are basically poker chips with fruit themed art, they are excellent components.
The numbered token are bright and colourful art-wise and while simplistic, the setup cards are pleasant enough. Otherwise, there's pretty much no more art, but this is a word game, how much art is needed?
The game has practically no iconography that needs learning.

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How's it play?
In Letter Jam each player is given a 5-letter word in the form of 5 face-down letter cards. Then the players have to collectively guess their individual words by looking at the clues given by other players and filling in the gaps.
Setup

• Setup card: Take the setup card that matches the number of players and put it into the central playing area. Put the green and red clue tokens on to their allotted spaces.
• Wildcard: Put the wildcard into the central playing area.
• Letter cards: Deal out all the letter cards to the players as evenly as possible.
  Then, using these cards, each player creates a 5-letter word, then shuffles these cards and passes them face-down to the player to their right. The remaining cards are discarded into a deck in the central playing area.
  Each player now takes the 5 cards given to them and without looking at them, places them into a face-down row in front of them.
• Letters: Then each player takes the 1st of their letter cards and slots it into a standee, with the card facing away, so only the other players can see it. Conversely, players can see the letters of all other players,.

Letter Jam is always played with 6 players; if playing with less than 6 people, nonplayer stands are added to the game to make up the numbers. Nonplayer stands have their own rules which aren't really important for the purposes of this blog.

On to play

• Discuss: After looking at the other players' letters, everyone should think of a clue (A word.) that they could give. Players then discuss who should be the cluegiver, they can talk about how many people they can help and so on. Player should be careful not to reveal too much.
• Cluegiver: Once the cluegiver has been chosen, they must take a clue token, the first clue token they take must be red, if they take further clue tokens, they must always take a green clue token, they can never take another red. This means that all player must participate in cluegiving at least a little bit.
  The cluegiver then takes numbered tokens and uses them to spell out the word they thought of.
  For example; the cluegiver sees the letters S, E, U, M & O. They put the 1 next to the M, 2 next to the O, 3 the U, 4 the S and 4 the E, this would be M, O, U, S, E or mouse. The cluegiver could also spell Moose, by putting numbers 2 & 3 both next to the O.
  The cluegiver can put tokens next to the wildcard, although they cannot say which letter they are using it for.
  
• Guessing: Using the guessing sheets, players write down what they can see. Thus the player who has the U in front of them would write down MO?SE, since that player cannot see the U, they put a '?' in it's place. Now players try and guess what their letter could be. In this instance, the missing letter could be a U (For MOUSE.) or a O (Spelling MOOSE.), this is noted on the guessing sheet.  Once everybody is happy with their guess, play progresses to the next round.
• Next round: Players now decide whether to stick with the same letter (If they're not sure what it is.) or move on to the next letter (If they feel confident enough.), in which case the current letter is removed from the standee and placed face-down, the new one is then slotted in its place on the standee. Once a player moves on, they can't go back to a previous letter.
  Then the discussion and cluegiving occur again.

The objective here is for each player to try and deduce what 5 letters they have.

Endgame
Discussion and cluegiving continue until one of the following 2 conditions are met.
There are no more clue tokens or players are happy with their deductions and want to guess their words.
Now all players take their 5 cards and keeping them face-down, rearrange them to spell the word they were originally given.
Once this is done all players simultaneously reveal their words.
If everyone has spelt a word, then everyone wins! Interestingly, it does not have to be the word that was given, so long as it's a real word, it counts!
If one or more players hasn't spelt a word... well... there's always next time.

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Overall
Letter Jam is a pretty clever little game that will tax players' grammatical and spelling abilities.
​Players will want to try and spell out distinct or unusual words so that there's less ambiguity for other players who will then have a better opportunity to guess their own letters. Ultimately though, players will probably end up having to employ deductive reasoning and make educated guesses and hope for the best. If you're an analytical player who sees all the possible variations in a situation, you'll probably end up overthinking Letter Jam.
There's not much more that can be said about Letter Jam, the game's depth doesn't arise from mechanics, it comes from players' abilities to spell words.

Letter Jam is a light game to play, has a lot of replay value and plays up to 6. If I have any criticism of Letter Jam, it might that the game feels a bit too overlong for what it is and rules are slightly fiddly. Otherwise it's mostly straight forward to learn and the game will have crossover appeal to non-gamers and is a reasonably fun cooperative game to play.