Upwords

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UpWords
A finished Upwords game
Designer	Elliot Rudell
Publisher	Hasbro Games
Players	2 to 4
Age range	10 years and up
Setup time	< 1 min
Playing time	45 to 90 minutes
Random chance	Medium
Skills required	Counting, Strategy, Vocabulary

Upwords is a board game invented by Elliot Rudell and published by Hasbro. The game is similar to Scrabble, except that letters can be stacked on top of other words to create new words. The higher the stack of letters, the more points are scored. This often makes words built in later turns of the game more valuable than earlier words, increasing play intensity.

The game is available in about twenty languages. Hasbro has recently licensed electronic marketing rights to Microsoft, making it available electronically for the first time since AOL bought Games.com and withdrew the game.

There have been national tournaments played in Hungary and Turkey.

[edit] Game play

Players draw letter tiles until they have seven tiles on their racks. The first player forms a word that covers one or more of the central squares. After forming a word, the player draws more tiles to replenish their rack. Play continues to the left.

Subsequent plays may put tiles on the board and on top of tiles already played, so long as all words formed are found in the dictionary being used. For example, if a word on the board is CATER, a player on a subsequent turn could put a B and E in front of CATER and then put an L on top of the C and a D on top of the R to build BELATED.

Players score one point for every tile in their word, and for each tile under their word. If the word is entirely on the first board layer, they instead score two points per letter.

Since Upwords lacks bonus squares like Scrabble, players are not allowed to pluralise existing words, to prevent people from capitalizing too much on other players' words.

Originally, Upwords was played on an 8×8 square board, which many players felt to be cramped relative to Scrabble's 15×15 grid.^{[citation needed]} Newer Upwords sets come with a 10×10 square board, which allows for much more comfortable play.

Unlike Scrabble, which is controlled by competitors Hasbro (in the U.S.) and Mattel (in Europe), Upwords is at this time solely under the worldwide licensing control of Hasbro, making it the only such worldwide word game property that can be Internet-marketed and Internet-offered with complete licensing control.^{[citation needed]}