Scrabble in 3D: Upwords

Stack the Tiles in Upwords

Upwords is a fun board game that has similarities to Scrabble. You place letter tiles on a game board to form words which score points. Words must be spelled from left to right or from top to bottom as in a crossword puzzle.

Unlike Scrabble, the tiles do not have individual point values. In Upwords, each tile is worth 1 point each (with a few exceptions). The Upwords game board is also smaller than the Upwords board and doesn’t have any special scoring spaces that double or triple word or letter values.

What makes Upwords really interesting is that the tiles are stackable. In addition to adding onto a word, you can cover all but one letter of a previously played word. Your score is the total of all the letters in your word plus any in the stacks you covered up.

You can’t go on stacking forever though. A letter tile stack can only be 5 tiles tall. Even with that limit, you can still rack up some pretty high scores when a play scores in several directions and includes several tall stacks of tiles.

We usually use a Scrabble dictionary to determine which words are legal when playing Upwords. You can just as easily use a regular dictionary, including online dictionaries these days.

What Scrabble and Upwords are to crossword puzzles, Wordsearch, the game reviewed in the next post, is to…well, word search puzzles.

Check the price of Upwords on Amazon.