Aiming to do for Scrabble what Balatro did for poker, Beyond Words gives you the same framework of a rack of tiles and a board upon which to make words, and also a set of ridiculous power cards that see your scores explode with each passing turn. As someone who has survived more than three decades of family holidays dominated by word games, I thought I would be more than ready to take on Beyond Words.
I was sorely mistaken.
Each level of Beyond Words starts with you facing an empty board, blank except for a couple of bonus squares similar to Scrabble’s triple letter and double word scores. You take the tiles from your hand and make words on the board. Words are scored by a combination of the points awarded for each letter and the length of the word – the longer the word the higher the point boost and higher the multiplier applied to all the points you earn. Up to here it’s very similar to Scrabble, though with more multiplying.
You have five moves with which to hit the necessary score total to proceed to the next round or you’re kicked from the game and have to start again. While the score target starts low at 500 points, it rapidly increases. 500 becomes 1500, which becomes 5000, 10000, then 30000. Soon you’re looking to scrape together more than 250,000 with just five moves. The only way to possibly reach those heights is with power cards – similar to Balatro’s Jokers. These cards add bonus points and multipliers to a word’s score if certain conditions are met. Keep It Short, for instance, adds 10 to a word’s multiplier if it is four letters or less. Or Loquiacious, a card that gains +5 multiplier every time you score two words or more in a single move. However, if you ever only make one word then it resets its stack.
Even with my decades of training on family holidays, I’ve really struggled to get past those increases in point demands. I get through the early rounds and then hit a wall with how many points I can generate in a move. I’ve not yet managed to get a gold trophy on any of Beyond Word’s 45 levels. (That’s not entirely true, I did ace the tutorial.) It feels like I’ve gone ten rounds with a dictionary and come out the distinct loser.
That said, I keep getting glimmers of what Beyond Words would be if I could meet its challenge. There was one game, for instance, where I found a set of powercards that all fed into one another. As well as Keep It Short and Loquicious, I picked up Power Of Five (which gives you a multiplier for every five-letter word) and Must Fit Somewhere (another stacking multiplier that gains +5 every turn so long as you don’t discard any tiles).
Whereas in Scrabble, I would generally just be looking for the longest word I can lay down, the composition of my power cards meant I had to be tactical. Every turn I was scouring the board for ways to create two words with the tiles in my hand, ensuring I kept building up my Loquacious streak.
Even when I had the tiles to play longer words, I held them back to ensure I wouldn’t run out of options to create two words in a single move. At one point I had the letters for ‘SCRAPES’ in my hand, I first played ‘SCRAP’, leaving myself able to extend the word on my next turn if I needed to. On the next turn I played ‘TILE’ across ‘SCRAP’s tail, turning it into ‘SCRAPE’. Then I drew an ‘R’, letting me place ‘RYE’ below and turn it into ‘SCRAPER’, instead of ‘SCRAPES’, and then ‘SCRAPERS’ the turn after.
Each time I extended the word, because I was making two words and not discarding any tiles, both multiplier stacks grew, seeing my scores start to jump exponentially. But also the pressure to maintain the streak drew – if I lost either multiplier I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demanding score totals. Beyond Words came alive at this moment, as I began playing a word game with rules determined by my unique hand of cards; in the next game, with a different set of cards, I would need to play to different rules to maximise my points.
Even with that blessed hand of power cards, I still lost, but I got much further than I had in previous attempts. While I’m certainly to blame for losing the game, I also wish Beyond Words were either a little more forgiving or perhaps more generous. While there was some canny wordplay on my part, I only got as far as I did in that round because I was offered a hand of powercards that paired well with one another.
Perhaps I missed the potential synergies of my power cards in previous games, or perhaps I hadn’t been offered cards that paired so well before, maybe it’s a little of both. Whatever the case, I had been playing for nearly three hours before I had this experience of Beyond Word’s coming into its own, which is a lot longer than it took to hit a similarly satisfying streak in Balatro.
I will likely return to Beyond Words – I dearly want to earn one of those gold trophies – but it’s certainly less compelling when the moments when its different systems come together have so far been so rare.
