Novelty [In progress]

Play as a wordsmith trying to write the next best seller by choosing your letters carefully, flexing your impressive vocabularies, and accounting for the public psyche in Novelty.

Game overview

Novelty is a card drafting, word building board game. Each game consists of three rounds of play where players will draft letters, build words, and score points. As players build the best words given the selection of letters, players will also need to account for the shifting literary landscape in the form of motifs, which add additional complexity to the writing process. The player with the most points at the end of the game is the winner and proves that they have the literary chops necessary to write the next bestseller.

Rules

Setup

At the beginning of the game, separate the cards into two decks and shuffle them. One deck of letter cards, which have a V on the back. The second deck of motif cards, which have an M on the back.

Players may also agree upon a dictionary or word list to use to resolve challenges of word validity. Recommended word lists are the Collins Scrabble Words(SOWPODS) and the Tournament World List.

Each round

Drawing phase

1. Flip over three motif cards from the deck. These motif cards affect the way the round is played. Some of these cards will affect how cards and words are scored. Some might add cards to a common pool. If you are just learning the game, it can be simpler to skip playing with motifs for the first round or game until everyone is comfortable with the general format of the game.
2. Next, each player draws three (3) letter cards. These will form the basis of the player’s hand. During drafting, players will add cards to their hands. After drafting, players will be using the letters in their hand and any common cards to create words and score points.
3. Next, each player draws eight (8) letter cards. These cards will be the drafting cards. Players will be choosing from these cards to add to their hand.

Drafting phase

During drafting, unless otherwise specified, all players keep their hand revealed. Players do not reveal the drafting cards.

1. Simultaneously, each player looks at the drafting cards they are holding and chooses one of the cards to add their hand.
2. Once everyone has chosen a card, players reveal the card they have chosen at the same time and adds the card to their hand.
3. Players pass the remaining drafting cards to the next player. In the first and third rounds, players pass their cards left. In the second round, players pass their cards right.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until there are no more drafting cards.

At the end of drafting, everyone should have eleven cards.

Word building phase

During this phase, players will be organizing the cards in their hand and any common cards to spell words. Players do not have to use all of the cards available to them. Once a player has decided what words they are going to spell, they may start a timer for 30 seconds. Once all players are decided or the timer has ended, players will submit their words. See word rules for limitations on words that may be submitted.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, a card may only be used for one word. Words are not constructed in a crossword style like in Scrabble or Bananagrams. Players also do not submit multiple words made up of the same cards by rearranging them and counting them as multiple words. For clarification, see example below.

Scoring phase

During this phase, each player presents the words they have made. Their words are scored by adding up the points on each card along with any points given by the effects of the cards used or any applicable motifs. Each letter card has a score for the card in the bottom left of the card. Players may apply these bonuses in the order that provides the most benefit.

After scoring all players’ submitted words, record the scores. Take the letter cards and motif cards and set them aside unless otherwise specified.

Repeat this process until players have played three rounds.

End of three rounds

At the end of the game, total each player’s score and declare the winner.

Examples of hands

[PICTURE HERE]

[EXPLANATION HERE]

Word rules

• Submitted words must be longer than 3 letters.
• They must be a valid dictionary word.
• We recommend playing with no acronyms, proper nouns, or hyphenated words.

Challenges

When scoring words, if a player believes that another player has submitted an invalid word, they are allowed to challenge the word.

1. Look up the challenged word in the agreed upon dictionary.
2. If the word is valid, the player that submitted the word can not score the word. The player who challenged the word is awarded 5 points.
3. If the word is invalid, the player that submitted the word scores the word as usual. The player who challenged the word does not score the shortest word they submitted.

Minor notes

Y’s consonant/vowel status

Y’s status as a consonant or a vowel is fuzzy. Sometimes considered a semivowel, there are uses of Y that qualify it as a vowel and there are uses of Y that do not. Thus, when scoring effects that are based on vowels, perhaps the easiest approach towards scoring is to allow each Y to count as either a vowel or a consonant but not both at the same time. An example is shown below.

Order of effects

Occasionally, effects that affect scoring may compound with one another. In these cases, the player may apply the order of effects in the most beneficial order. An example is shown below.

Order of motifs

Occasionally, some motifs may interact with one another. The order of motifs are applied in the order that they are flipped over. An example is described below.

Variants

The standard format of play listed in the rules section may not be to your liking. You might find that the drafting phase is too long for your taste or that you’d prefer to always have some common letters. You might find that some cards are too strong. You might prefer to not draft at all and instead deal random cards and pass cards like you might in Hearts. I strongly encourage you to play the game with whatever variant you prefer.

If you prefer to have more letters to play with, I suggest either extending the drafting phase by adding more cards, giving players more cards to begin with, or adding cards to the common pool by default. Perhaps you want to play with 5 motifs or use proper nouns or always use a timer. Perhaps a word is only considered valid during challenge if the player who submitted the word can offer a compelling definition of the word.

If you believe that certain cards are too strong, feel free to change them or add entirely new ones. Perhaps you play with a rule where people may only submit one word. This could be a good motif to add.

In cases of two players, perhaps it would be more interesting to play all rounds with the rule that you trade hands after drafting.

To keep the game speedy, consider implementing a time limit for both the drafting phase and the word building phase.

Whatever variations and house rules you decide to play with, I completely approve. In fact, if you would like to share them with others, please let me know and I can add it here. Even if you don’t want to share with others, I would personally be very interested in the variations and changes you make to the game.

Game components

• 168 letter cards (breakdown found below)
• 48 motif cards (breakdown found below)

Credits

This game was inspired by Tim Fowers’s Paperback board game. When I saw the combination of deck building (Dominion) with word building (Scrabble), I was struck by the union of those two ideas. After doing some brainstorming, I felt that combining the drafting mechanic, which I came to know and enjoy from Magic: The Gathering, Sushi Go and 7 Wonders, with the word building mechanic would create an interesting combination. As such, this game draws inspiration from a whole slew of games, from those listed to additional games like Bananagrams and Wordsy.

I also relied quite heavily in my research on TvTropes, which helped me identify common patterns in literature to use for motifs.

Art credit

I am no artist, so I was very reliant on others to help supply artistic assets for my game.

The font used by the game is Sina Nova, which I downloaded from FontSpring under their Fontspring Desktop/Webfont license which includes physical product use. While most letter cards prominently display individual letters, the primary intention of the product is not for users to use the cards to create their own typesetting.

The V shaped book is drawn using basic shape curves using the outline of the V letter of the Sina Nova font. It was then applied to the M letter from the same font.

The white parchment paper texture used is in the public domain in the US and under the CC0 designation courtesy of Photos Public Domain.

The eggplant linen texture used is provided by Company Folders for free under an unnamed license which covers its use, including commercial usage.

To help choose complementary colors for the places that needed a color that wasn’t black or grey, I used Adobe’s color wheel.

Finally, the card and box templates were provided by Make Playing Cards, which was the service I paid to print the game.

The literary examples used for the box art and on the motifs are all credited in close proximity of use. The usage of licensed work is discussed below.

Motifs and fair use

One aspect that tickled me when putting Novelty together was finding examples from literature that either directly exemplified or was cleverly connected to the motifs. This aspect of the game was almost entirely inspired by my illuminating experience reading the opening page of Nabokov’s Lolita - the paragraph in question can be found on the Alliteration motif card. I attempted to draw on varied sources across time periods and genres from a wide berth of authors. One of the effects I wanted the motifs to have was to celebrate the various works and authors that make up the literary culture that fuels the imagination of people like me.

Unfortunately, due to the number of sources I draw from, not all of these sources are found in the public domain. And due to the sheer number of these cases (over half of the motifs), I did not ask to license the use of these copyright protected works. Despite this, I believe that my usage of these copyrighted quotes is permitted under the Section 107 of the Copyright Act regarding fair use. However, because each case of fair use is only really settled in the law of court, this is merely my best judgment. If you happen to hold the copyright to one of the copyrighted works in question, please reach out to me.

Playtesters

I would like to thank my friends for play testing and providing some feedback on the game. Since I am not a professional game designer, you should feel free to provide feedback for the game by contacting me through my email. If you have played the game and provided feedback and want to be listed here, please do let me know. I would love to put your name here with your blessing.

Final remarks

Over the past couple months, I’ve spent a fair amount of time working on the game. I have tons of thoughts that I would love to talk about. If you have any questions or thoughts or feedback or comments, do not hesitate to reach out at thomas.r.jiang+novelty@gmail.com. If you are interested in playtesting a copy of the game, please let me know!

Letter card distribution

Motif cards