Za is a fully cooperative crossword-building game that aligns players’ incentives with finding the most interesting and obscure words in an increasingly challenging and ever-reshaping crossword. (Check it out on BoardGameGeek.com)
- For crosswording experts, this game can get quite a bit more challenging than other games in the genre. But, if you’re a novice, don’t worry! It’s fun for new players too; you start with just a couple of objectives, and the skill level of the game grows with you.
- Plays well with 1-5 players and easily splits into multiple parallel games. Just as fun to play solitaire or with a loved one as it is at a party.
- Excellent replayability: games often take at most 14 cards or so, and cards chain. With a large deck and combinatorial combinations, you’ll never play the same board twice.
- Fully collaborative, so you can still have fun playing with that friend who always trounces you in scrabble.
- A great way to improve vocabulary and have fun with language — e.g., how many palindromes are there in the English language that are more than 8 letters long? (Answer: there are 10.) And did you know ‘za’ is the only two letter ‘z’ word in the scrabble dictionary?
The additional components you’ll need for this game are a set of letter tiles and 4 chips or markers.