Spelling Brawl is a word game about wrestling. Players move around a hexagonal board by spelling words using the letter tiles printed on the board. Moving in specific patterns triggers attacks that can push opponents around and force them to discard resources. The objective is to defeat your opponent by either forcing them off the board or preventing them from moving.
Spelling Brawl was one of two word games that I designed. My theory about word games is that the core advantage of words is that we have the cognitive machinery built-in to quickly recognize them when we see them, making letters a uniquely complex medium for games that lean on pattern recognition. Word games are at their best when they rely on predicting words from a few letters or finding words among a large selection of letters.
Spelling Brawl takes the basic idea of a word search (find words among a grid of letters) and adds movement and tactical positioning. Words are paths in this game, and the player is trying to find the right paths to outmaneuver their opponent. The abstract board game Element was an inspiration in thinking about movement-based combat mechanics.
One of the main things I learned from Spelling Brawl (and also independently from playing Fae Tactics around the same time) is how elegant and powerful combining movement choices with attack choices can be. In many tactical games that offer a choice of different attack types, this choice is independent of the decision of where to move. The player moves to a location and then selects an attack from a list.
In Spelling Brawl, there are 3 types of attack, but the player never explicitly chooses which to use. Instead, the attack is implicitly decided by their movement. If they move toward an opponent, they body slam them. If they move away, they suplex them. If they run past an enemy, they clothesline them. What I like about this is that it leverages the power of Side Effects, giving the player more of an opportunity to discover cool moves by accident. In the process of spelling a long word, they may discover a way to execute a powerful attack; in the process of suplexing an opponent they may discover a long, valuable word.
I was not able to find a publisher for Spelling Brawl, sadly. The feedback I got seemed to suggest that most publishers are not interested in word games, in part because of perceived market dominance by Scrabble. The theme also makes things difficult, as it is assumed that there is little overlap between word game fans and wrestling fans. Thinking that the mobile market might be more receptive to this sort of game, I ended up redesigning Spelling Brawl as a mobile game about a penguin fighting off enemies on an iceberg.
Spelling Brawl is available to play over Tabletop Simulator.