This past weekend saw the first official Spell playtest, wherein the freedom fighters of the Blood Fens pulled a last-minute victory over the heavily favored Skylords. There were crocodile men, warmages, massive explosions, and proof that tackling is the best form of diplomacy.

Anyway, the playtest was pretty successful, with some minor caveats. We used the tweaked beta version of the ruleset, which cuts out some of the clunkier ideas, but adds an XP system of sorts. Also, there’s a character sheet now!

That being said, the game still needs some minor tweaks here and there. The idea behind the “categories of words” that you want to try to spell out needs to be made more concrete (or more examples need to be given). Plus, the long-term playability of the game needs to be put through its paces.

Of course, all of those updates will be available here in the near future!

With slight fanfare, I’m proud to announce the alpha-version ruleset of Spell, the game of wizardry and Scrabble tiles!

Be forewarned that the rules are still being tested (and the document itself could use more pizazz), but I feel that the foundation of the game is solid and ready to be played. Over the next month or so, we’ll be putting the rules through their paces. If there are any updates, I’ll be sure to post them here.

Also, if you give the game a try, I’d love to hear your feedback!

One more thing: If it isn’t obvious, you’ll need a regular set of Scrabble tiles to play the game. If you don’t own Scrabble, you can always make your own “tiles” from slips of paper according to the standard Scrabble letter distribution and scoring chart.

With our other projects firmly in the “being written and fully tested” category, we wanted to put something together that could go from playstormed idea to full game as quickly as possible. And I had just the half-baked idea: something to do with Scrabble tiles.

The basic idea started with characters being wizards of some sort and manipulating the names of the things to do magic. Players would get Scrabble tiles and spell words for points, trying to beat a target number. That’s about all I had before we started.

Epidiah and Jim made characters (a bookish halfling and an elf mercenary, respectively) and starting pulling letters. As we started to play, the rules began to take shape. I think we went through about three incarnations of rulesets before landing on something with which we could all agree. Most of my original ideas got scrapped, but it was for the best, as we ended up with a fun little game for people with good vocabularies.

Oh, and it wasn’t until after we had finished and we ready to get some lunch that I was able to come up with a name for the game: Spell. Nice and simple, eh?

All in all, it was a great success for our first true playstorm. An alpha version of the rules should be available real soon.