There’s a certain kind of chaos that only real-time games can create. It’s the moment when your brain suddenly forgets every skill you’ve ever worked on the moment the time pressure is on. I delight in this feeling, and this is exactly where Illiterati shines for me. Designed by Gary Alaka, Rob Chew, and Jon Kang, with art by Audrey Jung, and published by Gap Closer Games in 2023, Illiterati is a cooperative real-time word game for 1 to 5 players. Illiterati tasks players with frantically building words from a limited supply of letter tiles, all in an effort to craft the necessary words to defeat the evil secret organization that has taken over the world. Or something like that.

I have to commend Illiterati for its premise. It’s unique and interesting, if a bit nonsensical. The League of Librarians are trying to save the world’s books, one word at a time, and the Illiterati are determined to destroy it. The theme doesn’t really matter, but I appreciate the attempt to bring theme into what could otherwise be just a straightforward word game.

Each round, players are dealt a number of tiles each, as well as having some tiles in the centre of the table. Each player is dealt a card that they’re trying to achieve. Maybe one player needs to make one long word, of 8 characters or more and have 3 purple symbols in that word, while another player can have multiple words, but all of their words need to related to restaurants & fast food chains. And have 3 orange symbols to boot.

During the real time phase, players can freely swap tiles with each other and with the library, that communal pile in the centre of the table. But when the time runs out, all the words in front of everyone need to be valid words. They don’t necessarily need to fulfill each players card, but the do need to be words. And no, CXYSF is NOT a word.

Any unused tiles get pushed into the library, and if the library exceeds its limit (which scales based on the difficulty you choose at the start of the game), then no one can complete their card this round, and the timer that triggers the loss condition ticks closer to doomsday. But if the library is clear, then any players who achieved their card gets to discard all the words they used to complete their objective. Then the Illiterati attack. You flip over one card from the Illiterati deck, and just do what it says. Often it’ll discard some random tiles breaking the words you had made in the real time phase, but where Illiterati gets really tricky is the row of villain cards slowly fills up. If you ever flip over a card and the artwork matches one of the cards already in your row, you place it on top, and you preform the actions for the whole stack, starting from the top and moving down. Once you’ve resolved the attack, all players draw more tiles from the bag to add to the pile in front of them (leftovers from last round, likely words that have had key letters removed, thanks due to the Illiterati attack), and a new round begins.

The players keep playing rounds until either everyone is able to complete their personal objective card, then a second personal objective card, and lastly, everyone completes the same final, harder objective card to win. They lose if the library is full too many times and the doomsday tracker fills up.

Right out of the gate, I have to say that I appreciate that there’s only one way to lose. It feels like in most cooperative games there’s half a dozen ways to lose and only a single way to win. I understand why, it forces players to trade off short term risks with long term goals, but I found the focused goals in Illiterati refreshing. That’s not to say that Illiterati isn’t without trade-offs, it absolutely is. Like, do you strain your brain to try and make words matching this rounds theme, or should you just hold off another round in the hopes you’ll get the right tiles to make the word creation process easier. If you need 3 hearts in your word, and your only heart tiles are C, F, and X, maybe it’s worth waiting. But every round that goes by means another Illiterati attack, and once those start to stack, they can really wreck your words, sending you into a death spiral.

I couldn’t stop myself from comparing Illiterati to Bananagrams, another real-time word game. Though Illiterati strips away the crossword-style layout and focuses more on free-form word construction. Each player can have and hold between rounds up to eight words in front of them, but those words can be as long as you can manage, which led to some great moments where someone manages to assemble an absurdly long word out of a pile of mismatched tiles. There’s also quite a bit of joy in the moment when you draw new tiles, and you look at your beautiful words and need to pull them all apart to fit in the newcoming tiles.

The real-time aspect of the game does something to my brain. Once the timer is going, my stress spikes, and suddenly I’ve forgotten every word I’ve ever know. I’ll be looking at a F, L, U, F, F, and Y, and try to spell YLUFFF. But when you manage to break past that mental barrier, you can start to feel really clever. Especially those moments when you feel like you’re in a safe space early, because all your tiles are ordered neatly into words, and you can start peering across the table to help others with their tricky tiles. I found immense satisfaction in the process of looking over a pile of random letters, then slowly shaping them all into words.

Illiterati is a wonderfully produced game, the wooden tiles are a delight to hold and handle. They have a satisfying clink in the bag as you dive your hand in. The artwork on the Illiterati cards is vibrant and full of whimsical villainy. The box itself even looks like a book when you stack it on your shelf. I love everything about this production.

As a Co-op game, Illiterati does a pretty great job of balancing having people focus on their own task, while offering moments where you can collaborate and work together. From shifting the right symbols to each other, to offering to take someone’s stray K, it does often feel like you’re working as a team. I can’t really comment on the dreaded ‘alpha gamer’ problem, as that’s not a dynamic that exists at my tables, but I suspect the timer is the real track to resolving that, though. A quarterback can’t tell everyone what to do until their own board is satisfied.

All this being said, your enjoyment of Illiterati is going to hinge almost entirely on how you feel about word games in general. If the idea of staring at a pile of letters and trying to form words fills your heart with dread, or if games like Scrabble or Bananagrams stress you out, then Illiterati probably isn’t going to change your mind. The pressure of the timer only amplifies that feeling. But if you enjoy that kind of challenge, there’s a lot here to like.

There’s also a decent amount of replayability built into the system. The objective decks are thick, and you only use a couple cards each game. There are multiple difficulty levels to explore, and the shifting combination of constraints and Illiterati effects keeps the experience from feeling too repetitive. It’s not endlessly variable, but it’s more than enough to support repeated plays with different groups.

At the end of the day, Illiterati is a fun, smart, and slightly chaotic cooperative word game. It might feel a bit simple at times, closer to Bananagrams without the spatial crossword puzzle, but I found Illiterati to be a ton of fun and am happy to add it into my permanant collection.