If you’re looking for a word game like Scrabble but want a fun theme, look no further! Spell Smashers is your best bet with a mechanic players already know!
Spell Smashers is a 1-5 player game designed by Christopher Chung and published by Renegade Games. A typical game of Spell Smashers will take 45-60 minutes.
Spell Smashers: $45.50
Get yours for less at Miniature Market
Harness the power of your vocabulary in this exciting, monster-battling, loot-collecting word game. In Spell Smashers, you combine your letter cards to spell words, smashing fearsome monsters and their even more fearsome adjectives!
When you deal damage to a monster, you gain precious coins. When you defeat a monster, you collect that monster as a trophy…and gain a new letter to use later on! But beware – as you battle these dangerous creatures, you receive wounds, which are difficult letter combinations that could ruin your day.
Between battles, visit the local town and spend your hard-earned loot to outfit yourself with powerful gear, take on new quests, buy devious potions, or grab an ale at the tavern as you boast about your battle scars. Set your sights on fame and glory as you smash monsters with your spelling skills and rid the world of evil!
Ages: 12+
Players: 1-5
Game Length: 45-60 minutes
Spell Smashers: Dungeon Crawling Meets Scrabble
In Spell Smashers you are playing as an Adventurer trying to defeat various monsters and collect weapons, treasures, and gold. The method for defeating a monster is what makes this game unique. In order to fight and kill monsters, you create words. You will form words with letter cards which come from three different decks. You have consonants, vowels, and wounds. You gain wounds from fighting most monsters.
Wound cards have difficult to use letters such as X, or even combinations of hard letters like QU or ENT for example.
Each game will play for seven rounds. These rounds consist of creating a word, fighting a monster, and visiting town. If you land the killing blow on a monster you gain the monster tile as a trophy worth three points. Another benefit of the monster tile is it can act as a letter for future words. The letter is based on the monsters name. For example, the Kraken is a K and the Minotaur is a M.
The letter cards in Spell Smashers also have elements to them and some monsters can be weak or strong against different elements based on random modifiers. You can get weapons that will boost the damage of your words based on many different criteria. There are potions that can manipulate your letters or the elements of your letters.
At the end of each of the first six rounds, you will visit the town after fighting the monsters. Each player will gain a new guild card, which are quests that you try to compete for victory points. Then each player may visit one building of their choice with one exception. If you have five wounds in your hand you must visit the Shaman.
The Shaman will get rid of all your wounds but you will also lose the monster trophy which is not good. Otherwise, you can visit the Blacksmith to gain a new weapon or armor to help your word making.
There is also the Alchemist where you can buy potions to heal wounds, change your letters element or even change one letter of your choice to another. You can also visit the local tavern to boast about your cool scars, by gaining ale tokens, which are victory points, for each wound in your hand.
If you don’t have or don’t want to spend your hard earned gold, you can choose to visit the Guild in order to get another quest card. The village in Spell Smashers offers many options to aid your adventure.
Spell Smashers also features a solo mode which uses the opposite side of the game board and has you defending the village from different boss monsters.
I really enjoyed Spell Smashers, it has a fun theme and puts an interesting spin on it. As far as word games go it’s definitely different. One negative thing I can say is that it can suffer from analysis paralysis. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with a good word or specifically a word that will defeat the specific monster you are trying to kill. I’ve definitely been guilty of overthinking during a session of Spell Smashers.
Otherwise, I think this game is great and will be an excellent addition to your game nights. Not only will you have a good time, but you will also flex your vocabulary skills as well.
