Game University: Spell It!

As soon as we stepped foot into the Javits Convention Center during our visit to this year’s NYC Toy Fair, we beelined it straight to the Blue Orange Games display. Toy Fair is an industry convention where we meet with toy and game company representatives, and they tell us about their newest products. Our excitement for the Blue Orange booth stemmed from the plethora of new game titles we had caught wind of in the weeks prior to the convention.

The most recently released game by Blue Orange is Spell it! It’s a great older-player party game that really kicks your brain into high gear. Each Spell It! comes with five letter dice, various point chips and a tin in which you roll the dice.

To start, one person picks a category at the beginning of the round. Suggested categories are listed in the instructions, and they range from geography to household items; famous people to “no nouns,” etc... Or, you can opt to create your own.

Once a category is determined, one player rolls the dice. The first player to think of, shout out and spell a word that is related to the aforementioned category so that it utilizes three of the five letters on the dice, wins a point chip. The number of points they win is determined by the number of letters in the word that is shouted and spelled.

For example, if the predetermined theme is "around the world," and the dice are rolled as shown directly above, I could shout out and spell, "Duluth." That would earn me a total of six points because my answer contains six letters. The category for the next round is determined by the point chip the winner has just received. Categories are written around the numbers on the back of every chip.

The trick to the game is to be able to see words in the letters and to quickly categorize them. This requires your brain to sift through thousands of words and associations in milliseconds. The amount of mental dexterity it takes to consistently come up with appropriate answers is astounding. The more associations you have in the categories that are chosen, the more chance you have to win.

The quicker you're able to recall, verbalize and then spell the word, the better you'll perform. Sometimes, however, the first appropriate word you think of might not earn you very many points. Strategically you must determine if you use the answer that first comes to your mind to be the quickest, or if you'll think of a longer word (while simultaneously risking that someone else will think of a scoring answer in the meantime) that will earn you more points. Once all of the point chips have been earned, you tally them up and whoever has the most wins the game.

Spell It! is a great way to keep your brain active and healthy while maintaining and expanding your vocabulary. It also forces you to spell words correctly without a computerized spell check, which we rely so heavily upon these days. I've also found that people are able to recall rather obscure words to win, which gets everyone talking, laughing and learning.