I designed a perfect-information word game based on a very similar
scheme, which I personally love. I never published it though, because
playtesters didn't respond positively enough to it (mainly because it
caused too much analysis paralysis for the normal people I recruit to
playtest my games), but nonetheless some to the mechanisms are worth
discussing. Here's how the game went:
1. It's played on two side-by-side grids, each 9 cells wide (although
it can be played on different grids, 9-cells wide seemed ideal.)
2. You own one grid, and your opponent owns the other.
3. Players take turns. On each turn you write down a word in the
upmost available horizontal row on your grid. Your score for turn is
the number of letters that your word shares with your opponent's most
recently played word, times the number of letters in the longest word
that you formed *vertically* when you added the new word
horizontally. For example, if you wrote "tan" on your first turn, and
then on your second turn, you wrote "cat" such that the "t" from cat
is directly below the "a" from "tan", then you would have formed the
word "at" vertically. Since "at" is 2 letters long, your score for
that turn is 2 times however many letters "cat" shares with your
opponent's most recently played word.
4. the first letter of your word may be in any cell, as long as the
word fits completely in your grid.
5. No word may be played twice, and you may not play a word that
contains in its entirety a word previously played by any player.
6. There's a bonus if your word is an anagram of your opponent's most
recently played word.
7. Game ends after say, 8 turns. Highest score wins.
8. If you think your opponent played a fake word, you can challenge
it, and if it is a fake word, you're opponent gets zero points for his
turn. If your challenge fails, you must skip your next turn. Fake
words *are not* removed from the board after they've been played.
9. Since the score is undefined for the each player's first turn, the
first turn of the game works differently:
-To begin, a word is picked randomly from the dictionary, and then
player 1 writes that word into his topmost gridline. He also adds any
number of points he wants to either player's score column. Then
player 2 decides whether to play as player 1 or player 2. This acts
as a pie rule, and the randomly chosen initial word ensures that each
game will proceed very differently.
-The score for player 2's first turn is the just the number of letters
that his first word shares with the randomly chosen word that player 1
wrote down on his first turn.
I'm pretty sure that these are the complete rules, but there is some
small chance that I missed something because it's been a long time
since I explored this game. If any of you try it, please give me
feedback. If you have suggestions for altering the game to reduce
analysis paralysis I will be especially grateful.
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