Base price: $25.
1 – 6 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A review copy of Typeset was provided by DVC Games.
My sleep schedule has been busted lately, so here I am, writing a review at 6:30 because I’m wide awake. Make hay while the sun shines and all that. It’s the final con of the year, for me, anyways, so might as well churn out a few more reviews before it becomes too hectic. Holidays and such. Word games remain one of my absolute favorite genres of games; so much to them and so many different ways to play, so naturally, I was pretty stoked to get to try another one. Let’s dive into Typeset and see how it plays!
In Typeset, players are setting up old-timey printing presses by adding letters as they come and printing cool words with them. Naturally, this means you can only be so picky; you don’t want to rerack an entire word or whatever they call taking all the letters off the press and starting over. That’s not really ideal. This means you might have to take some big risks and big swings if you want to pull off big scoring plays. But you’re cool with that, right? Will you be able to spell the best words?
Contents
Setup
Not a ton, which is nice. Every player gets a player sheet. Each one is a different font! You should set down and shuffle the tiles face-down:
Set the board in the center of the play area, and then add an Ability Card:
Those are pretty fun. You should be ready to start!
Gameplay
Typeset is pretty simple. Over a few rounds, you’ll draw letters and add them to rows on your board, starting with the leftmost available space in each row (usually). Just be careful! You can only stop collecting letters between rounds, so if you decide to start a new round and don’t like what you get, you might be stuck.
For a given round, start by flipping one tile and adding it to the leftmost available space on the bottom of the board. All players must either add that letter to an available row on their board or cross off an Error (if they have any remaining) and skip it. Before you add any letter, you can add vowels or wild letters, if you’ve earned them. To add one or more vowels, cross them off on your player sheet and add them like a normal letter. Keep in mind, though: you only get so many. Wild letters are earned a variety of ways:
- Using columns of vowels
- Filling in all four marked spaces
- Using challenging letters
- Using the Ability Card all three times
When you unlock a wild letter, you must immediately place it or forfeit the right to do so.
After five letters are drawn, the round is over! Move them to their spots on the board proper and then players can decide if they want to continue. Just keep in mind that choosing to continue is committing to another five letters!
Once a player has stopped, they can tally their score (or wait until all players have stopped to annoy them, which I support). Words are scored by length; valid words score the rightmost filled-in box’s number; invalid words are awarded negative points in the same way. I generally just Google a word and see if I get a result that’s not Wiktionary, but you should probably decide on a dictionary in advance? Live your best life. No proper nouns, but if you can get players to agree to multilingual dictionaries or slang, that’s totally legal. I pretty much always respect using slang in word games unless someone’s trying to spell RIZZ to be a jerk in Scrabble.
Either way, player with the most points wins!
Player Count Differences
Not many, honestly. Each tile is drawn and played independently and players have enough to stress about with drawing letters to worry about messing with each others’ boards. The most you’ll see is players debating whether or not a word is valid, but I find there’s often horse trading there at higher player counts because if you say a player’s word is valid they’re hopefully more likely to do the same for you later. Or maybe not and I’m just weird. I think that the game is quite fun at two players as well, since you’re just going head-to-head with the same letters from the same starting place. It has the nice feel of one of those roll-and-write games where everyone gets the same draws, but with words! No player count preference.
Strategy
- Leave yourself some options. If you’re not sure what to do with a letter, either take an Error or just dump it to the next row. Plenty of words start with a wide variety of letters, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting a word with X.
- Don’t just blow through all of your vowels. You shouldn’t necessarily be super stingy, either, but running yourself out of a vowel early in the game will certainly mess you up later. Just try to dole them out with some precision.
- Plan to use the Challenge Letters; that extra wild goes a long way. They’re not great letters to use, but something like QUICKLY can burn through at least two. No luck for you QUAXLY fans, though; proper nouns are still not allowed (usually).
- The Ability Card should factor into your decision-making, too. There are a lot of ways that the Ability Card can help you out, so try to make sure you’re making good use of it! Plus, if you use it three times, you get another wild letters.
- You can see on the board how many of certain letters are left. No guarantees, but at least worth taking into consideration. We went an entire game without drawing an S, which was as funny as it was deeply problematic. That said, if all the spaces on the board are filled, you’re definitely not drawing that letter again. Plan accordingly.
- If you’re playing against seasoned word game players, you’ll probably want to fill as many rows as possible. This is the kind of game that word game pros will just wreck you at, so don’t necessarily quit early with a bunch of five-letter words. You might need to push.
- Taking Errors isn’t terrible. You get a few for free.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Press-your-luck is always a fun genre, and combining it with word games is sinister but still very fun. Two of my favorite genres. It’s like when Paperback did word games and deckbuilding: two great tastes that taste great together. The press-your-luck creates some good drama and prevents players agonizing for too long over various things.
- I love that the player cards are fonts, though I would love a like, promo set that only has garbage fonts like Papyrus or Wingdings. I try not to pick on Comic Sans anymore because I’ve been informed that it’s quite dyslexia-friendly and we love accessible design. Papyrus, however, sucks.
- I absolutely love the Ability Cards. We played with Translation, one game, which counts a word as valid if it sounds like a valid word, which led to the game being genuinely hilarious. There are so many fun Ability Cards that let you do things you should not be allowed to do in word games, and honestly, they up the game from being fun to being inspired.
- Very portable! This is a great date night game or travel game, though you’ll want a stable surface for the tiles since you’d ostensibly like to keep track of what’s already been played.
- For a press-your-luck game, you usually have a good amount of options. The wild letters and vowels offer a lot of flexibility; it’s really quite nice. You get to start in one spot and end up with completely different words than you intended, and that’s good.
- Very quick game. The rounds are short and honestly, once you’ve got a sense of it, you could really bust through a game in 15 minutes. That’s kind of awesome, especially for a word game.
- It’s a very clean game, aesthetically. What it lacks in color it makes up for in simple and approachable design. It’s pleasant to look at, even for someone who vastly prefers colorful games.
Mehs
- You do know pretty quickly if you’ve screwed yourself. Negative points are pretty much a game-ender (but not always!). Thankfully, games are extremely short so you can regain your honor with a rematch if you’re into that sort of thing.
- It feels like players should have to decide to continue or stop simultaneously so that there’s not some weird race condition where I’m waiting to see if you stop before I decide if I want to stop. I doubt that would come up that often (just because stopping with invalid words doesn’t make a ton of sense), but it could be frustrating for players if they see a player wait to see if they’re stopping and, seeing that they have, choose to continue to try to edge them out on points.
Cons
- Similarly, this is one of those games where players can be a bit annoying. It’s one of those things where someone will try to calculate their score and yours before deciding whether or not to stop. I don’t normally have too much of a problem with that, but given the intricacies of scoring, it could take a while for them to do that. Just yell at them if they’re wasting time.
Overall: 8.5 / 10
Yeah, Typeset is great. I love word games, generally (with the occasional exception), but press-your-luck is a genre that appeals to my Icarian lack of common sense and so I occasionally just fly directly into the sun, in a gameplay sense. It’s fun to crash and burn, and I think quick games do a great job of giving you just enough rope to clown yourself without punishing you by drawing out your self-induced catastrophe. Here, Typeset also gives you a good amount of flexibility both in the number of rows you have to dump letters into and a generous helping of both free vowels and wild letters to make sure you’re not wholly dependent on cruel, random chance. I love cruel, random chance, though, so it works out fine for me either way. I think that this game is going to appeal a lot to fans of various word games who want to shake things up or folks who are looking for a great game to take on a vacation. I’d love to play this with my family if they didn’t generally dislike board games, but you can’t win them all, I suppose. There’s some nuance around how the end of the game works that I don’t necessarily love since it could let players try to gauge if other players are going to continue, but I usually game with one of my best friends so we’re pretty honest about the whole thing (and it’s pretty obvious when someone should stop or continue), so I don’t see that being a problem very often. That said, the shining star of the game are the Ability Cards. Some of them make the game extremely silly, and there aren’t enough silly word games out there, so these really caught my eye. Can’t recommend them enough. If you’re looking for a quick word game, you enjoy pressing your luck, or you just want to play games that prominently feature Garamond, Typeset will likely be right up your alley! I’ve had a blast with it.
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