By this point, you probably know that I’m a fan of word games. From Hardback to Paperback to Paperback Adventures to Bananagrams and Illiterati, I enjoy word games quite a bit, and I enjoy discovering new ones. I know there are books and books of word games, and dozens of apps with daily word puzzles that I could be playing, but I’m always fascinated by how many different games there are to play using nothing more than letters and words. Half the fun for me is simply discovering another take on such a familiar idea.

Letter Tycoon has players making words with cards. Each player starts with seven letter cards in hand, and there are three common cards available in the middle of the table. On your turn, you can use as many of those common letters as you want to make a word. Depending on how long your word is, you’ll earn money which is points. The only thing you use your money for is to buy patents. Patents are really the heart of the game because some of them will give you persistent abilities for the rest of the game.

Most patents simply give you an extra cent whenever another player uses one of your letters. Naturally, that means you should probably grab the E, T, A, O, and I patents first. They’re more expensive, of course, but they also seem like they’ll pay for themselves over the course of the game. The less common letters like Q, W, and X are cheaper, but they usually come with unique powers as well. Some let you double the money you earn from a word, while another lets you create two words in a single turn. There are some neat ideas in the patent system, and I do like the feeling of gradually building a little engine around the letters you own.

The goal is ultimately to accumulate wealth. The game ends once someone reaches the wealth threshold, which is calculated using both the money they have on hand and the value of the patents they’ve purchased. Buying an expensive patent doesn’t actually reduce your wealth because its purchase price counts as part of your assets. It’s kind of like buying a house. Yes, you spend a lot of money, but you also gain an asset that’s theoretically worth the same amount. Well… maybe that’s not the best comparison these days.

Letter Tycoon is an interesting concept, but it falls short compared to many of the other word games I’ve played recently, especially Hardback. The biggest issue for me is randomness. You’re drawing back up to seven cards every round, and sometimes you just draw a terrible hand. There were turns where I had a single vowel available between all ten letters I could use, and there were other turns where it felt like I had nothing but O’s and U’s. Sometimes a bad draw simply means you don’t have a worthwhile turn, and that kind of sucks.

Image Credit: Eric @Kalchio via BGG

Another issue is that there are no wild cards. You’re completely beholden to the ten letters available to you. Maybe those letters don’t let you spell anything useful. Maybe they don’t let you create a word long enough to afford the patent you wanted. That’s probably uncommon, but the possibility exists, and it’s frustrating. Coming from games like Hardback and Paperback, it’s hard not to compare them. Paperback always has a common vowel available, while Hardback lets you turn any card into a wild. Those little design decisions give you just enough freedom to make the words you want to make, or at least turn a bad hand into something salvageable. I never quite felt that same flexibility here.

Another reason the game frustrates me is that you simply earn more money for making bigger words. There’s nothing really pushing you toward making interesting words or finding clever combinations of patents. You just make the biggest word you can because bigger words equal more money. Yes, to buy a patent you have to use a letter in your word, but you’ll rarely be blocked out of buying patents due to none existing for the letters you just used. Compare that to Hardback, where you might deliberately use certain letters because they synergize with one another or because they activate special abilities. Here, having a larger vocabulary is simply better. I’m not terribly against that in principle, but it also feels like the design could have done something more interesting with the letters.

I guess that’s where a lot of my frustration comes from. I’ve played a lot of great word games, so when I play one that hasn’t really solved these issues, I notice it immediately. That’s probably a little unfair. Not every word game needs to solve problems the same way, and not every game should copy Hardback. But after seeing other designs tackle these issues so elegantly, it’s difficult not to miss those ideas when they’re absent.

My next criticism is that individual games don’t really feel that different from one another. Every time you sit down to Letter Tycoon, the only thing that’s changing is the letters in your hand. There’s no real arc to the experience. Sure, you might pick up a couple of powers that let you double your earnings or make two words, but for the most part you’re simply using ten letters to make words over and over until someone accumulates enough wealth to end the game. I never got the feeling that I was discovering new strategies or that future plays would unfold much differently than the previous one.

I will say that I really enjoy the artwork. All of the patent cards are illustrated as blueprints for different inventions and technologies, and they look great on the table. It’s a small thing, but I appreciated the presentation every time I looked at a new patent.

I think Letter Tycoon is worth trying once. I don’t think there are many hidden strategies waiting to be uncovered, and I don’t think there are many reasons for me to come back after a play or two. If you don’t have a large vocabulary, you’ll simply do worse, and unfortunately there are plenty of other word games that offer more interesting decisions, more variety between plays, or better ways to reward clever use of shorter words instead of simply making the longest word possible.

At the end of the day, I played Letter Tycoon twice on Board Game Arena, and I think that’s where I’m going to leave this one. It has a few neat ideas, particularly with the patent system, but when I have so many stronger word games on my shelf, it’s hard to justify coming back.