Defenders of the Dictionary ►►► How can a co-op word game be this good?

0:00 Hey everybody. Today on Roto runs through, we're preving a prototype of Defenders of the Dictionary. But before I get going, please turn your subtitles on to the Clingon channel so that when I make rules goose, you'll know what they are. And if you've done that, well then welcome to Wordopouloolis, a bustling city that is under threat from super villains like the nefarious winger here. Uh who in mission six of the game has unleashed his um wing or dingalings, monsters that are running rampant through the city. And it's our job as the defenders of the dictionary to save the day in this cooperative word building game. And I'm going to show you how it works today in a solo run through. Now, the way it works is out of the gate, you've got a 17 different missions to pick from. Although, you can play through all of them in a big epic campaign where at the end of all those missions, depending on how well you did on all the chapters, you will go to a unique boss fight and a special ending just for you. I'm jumping into the middle of the mission. We're playing mission six today. Wing Dingalings.

1:06 There's the story. Winger is uh you know he's unleashed the monsters. And on the back side of this, it tells me how to set up the board. We use the HQ board and this nighttime um west wordopouloolis board. And it says we have to start here instead of over here. We have to put a couple of obstacles in two buildings, these Tetris shapes that are under assault and two of the dinglings, these uh monsters. And we also have to put various points of interest. Number one goes here. Number six goes here. And the other ones are all randomized. Okay. So I have already done that. Although you can see I placed these out randomly. I don't know what they are, but these could really change things up for me. Okay. The number four is over here. The number Oh, good. The number two is over there. And the number three is there. And the number five is right there. So 1 2 3 4 5 six. In a mission where you've got points of interest where they're face up with numbers, which this is one of those missions, you have to hit them in order.

2:10 First, we've got to visit that one, then that one, then that one. We cannot go to number six until we've done all the previous ones. All righty. So, this is us having set up the board. And again, each of these different missions has, you know, a different combination of things that go on the board and rule cards you get out. In addition to 17 missions, there are a ton of different rules. And every mission is going to be a different combination of rules. Today, we're dealing with urban distress. That's why there's these things under fire. There are the dinglings, these monsters. And not only are the dinglings here, but we have to catch them. In other missions, you might not have to catch them, but we do. And this little rule card tells us how to do it. Now, if we come back here, it tells us to win this mission, we have to catch one dingling. We have to make it to three um of the six way points. And so that means [clears throat] we've got to hit 1, two, and three. We don't have to hit the other ones, but we have to hit at least those. And there should be a thing here saying how many points we have to get. I did contact the publisher. It's 50. We have to get 50 points and do these other two things. In addition to these mandatory objectives, we have a bonus objective we can do if we can win. we complete this stuff and all the dinglings are either in central or western Wordopouloolis, that will be a bonus reward. And the more of these bonus rewards we can do throughout the campaign, the better our endgame um reward will be. So anyway, got the game set up here and now I've got to set

3:40 myself up. Everybody starts with a bag of letters and everybody in secret draws five. Cannot tell anybody what you drew. So I've got an I. Always good to start with some vowels and an A and a D and a W and a T. Okay. Now, if we if I was playing multiplayer, you would have your own little letter holder. You would also draw draw from your own bag. But since I'm playing solo, well, there is basically an automated rule that replicates what another player would do. You'll see that in a bit. But you just have to imagine if you were playing on with me, you'd have your own five letters. Um, and remember, we are cooperating in this game. This may look kind of like Scrabble with superheroes, but it is not competitive. We all win or lose together by defeating, in this case, Winger. So, um, I've got my letters. At the beginning of every round, we draw one letter from the villain bag. What have we got for our first one? It is the letter B. All righty. And now, what we've got to do is we have to come up with the best word we can that includes the letter B. If we do not, if we fail to do that, we will lose three points. And remember to win in amongst everything else we've got to do, we've got to get 50 points. So, that would not be a good start. Although, at the beginning of the game, if you have no points, then you have no points to lose. But obviously, we're going to score some points when we make a word.

5:08 Now, here's what everybody does. Everybody looks at the uh word, the the main letter, the danger letter. I forget what it's called. The the uh the villain letter plus any letters we still have up here on the common board from a previous round. We combi we think about combining those letters with whatever we have. But I can't use all my letters. What I'm going to do is I'm going to pick two of these five letters and contribute them to the common pool of letters. My teammate is also going to pick two randomly. And then once everybody has selected what letters, we reveal them all. This becomes the common pool. And this is what we have. And right off the bat, you know, obviously we could do bat. That would be a nice easy safe one. We don't lose three points. And the word the letters we don't end up using stay up here and are saved for a future round.

6:03 That's the basics of how this works. So anyway, I do not know what my teammates are going to add. Oh, by the way, I should say if you're playing a solo or a two-player game, you put two of them because you can see there are four spaces. If you're playing a fourplayer game or a three or four player game, every player only puts one out here. Um, so I I do think right out of the gate, if I go on ahead, I mean, it was just random. If I throw the I've I'm guaranteed to succeed. I can't possibly fail. I've got bat. Um, but do I want to do that? Do I want to try and do something else? Well, you know what? If I could, I'd definitely throw out the I so I could do bait, but remember, I'm limited. I can I can only pick two. And remember, if I was playing with three other players, I could only pick one. I could only contribute one at a time. And I'd have to be thinking about, well, what's going to combine best with um B, the letter B, plus whatever my other teammates might do. Since I'm playing solo, and this would be true in a two-player game, I have a little bit more control. I'm going to throw out the AT. And now, well, hey, if my teammate throws out an I, that wouldn't be bad.

7:10 Let's see what they throw out here. They throw out a V and an R. We now have our communal group, and we have to make the best thing we can out of that. Oh my gosh, we could almost have brave. If we had an E, we could go for brave. Um, but we didn't. Now, um, what am I going to do? I don't have to make a word at all. We can say, you know what? we're going to not defend the dictionary this round. Um, and uh, that would be very, very bad. Although it wouldn't be the end of the world. We would lose three points and this B would go away. But on the other hand, I'd be saving this stuff if I was trying to um, you know, you know, okay, I've got the D. If I could get an E, I could go for trade in a future or an E and an L, we could get travel. That would be awesome. So, we could, and it's at this point once all the letters have been revealed, players can start talking about what their plans are. While we're still in the picking our letters phase, there are two rules for how we are limited in communication. We cannot give anybody any idea of what we have on our own little shelf. Nor can we talk about what word we might intend to um, you know, put on the board. But um we can talk about oh my gosh we're running out of time we need to finish this one before we do that one or whatever we can strategize in general about anything we can see the letters that are in the public domain which again I am going

8:42 why' I put those back I was going for at we we we can talk about letters that had been left over from a previous round the evil villain letter and what's out here but we can't talk about stuff that can't be seen that's the basic rule so [snorts] it's at this point folks that I am going to reveal. I'm terrible at word games and I'm just going to keep it simple. I'm just going to go for B A. It's a nice easy threeletter start. Not too much pressure. We'll be saving my the second players R and V for a future round. But I can be think, you know, I can be thinking about this got dr. If I could draw an E or if my teammate could draw an E, we could have drive in the second letter, right? That or in the second round. So that's not bad. So, remember this said that we have to start our saving of the city on this map, not on this map, on the star. So, that's right here. So, I've got a couple ways I could do it. I'll probably just go B A T, but I don't have to. I could go B A T and start working my way up here or down this way. You cannot place on an occupied spot. You can't place anywhere where there's not grid. So, we can't build in the middle of this. Is this a park? I guess we can't build over in the middle of this building that's on fire, but we do need to think strategically about where this word is going to go because of course, just like Scrabble in the next round, we're going to have to expand from here. So, this kind of like puts us in a corner. I think this is the better way to go. We have the opportunity to work our way up by ending

10:12 a word with a T, by working our way down by using a word that has a or a word that has B. I think this is a good start. All righty. So, um, and everybody has to agree. We could still talk. We could still strategize. We just can't tell anybody about anything we've got in our back pocket. So, when I'm playing alone, well, I've got nobody to strategize with other than you folks who can tell me down in the comments what words I should have used every step of the way, which is what happens every time I film a word. But, I'm pretty happy with this as a start. You know, it fits our limited space. It it gives me maximum options to travel north because remember, we have to get here and we have to get here. And let's not forget, we have the rule of um catching the dinglings. Specifically in this mission, we have to capture one of them, either the bats or the ghoul. Their names are right here um on rule H. This is what their names are. And it's important to know that because whenever the dinglings are out, rule G is in effect. And what that means is if we make a letter or word with any of the letters from the names of the dinglings, they are going to move around. So I just did b a t are b a t in um ghoul or bats. Yes, they are. You can see how these are four.

11:30 They all have unique letters. So I have used three of the four letters in the word bat. So the bats are gonna go for a ride. I didn't use G uh H O URL. So, the ghoul is going to stand still. And that's a good thing because maybe we'll have a chance to catch that ghoul and complete our one capture that we have to do before the ghoul breaks out and starts running rampant. But these bats, they're going to zip around everywhere. So, anyway, I've made the word. It's three, four, five points. We've gotten five of the 50 points we have to do. And um rule G goes into effect that says, well, hey, roll the dieice and move them a number of spaces based on the letters that match. Uh so the bats are going to move up to three steps if the die lets them because you can see they cannot go west or north. If they go east or south, they're going to move around a little bit. And this die says that they want to go, you can see the little S there.

12:33 They're heading south. Um, right. Oh, except wait. As part of setup, this little bat is stuck. Um, you know, it's very clear they cannot move through a space that contains a tile or token. The only way they could go would be east. So, if we had rolled east for them, they'd be moving. Or if we'd rolled the any direction, which they had a 50, you know, a one in three chance of rolling. Well, then they would have headed east and started going off in this direction. But they rolled south. They can't go there. So, they are stuck. Um, which is good for me because I don't want them creating more chaos. So, anyway, that was it. The first round is over. We have saved some letters and now we're going to go on to round two where we get a new letter that if we don't use it, we're going to start losing points. The new letter is U. All right. Um, right. So, we need to be thinking about Oh, and we all refill our rack. So, I have two more letters to replace the ones I use. And again, this is still kept secret. I've got an O and a P. And so now in round two, it's time to start thinking. I can bring two of these up here. Two will come from my teammate who I cannot strategize with. They're just going to be random. And then those um seven letters are what we're going to use.

13:48 Plus one of these letters to make the best word we can. And now we need to start thinking about not only what word can we wake, but where are we going to put it? If we can head south like this, we can hit our first milestone. Remember, I've got to hit first this space, then this space, then this space. I have to do them in this order. If they had been all face down, then the objective would have been I just have to get to a certain number of them before time runs out. Time runs out when this bag empties. But in this game, I've got to go here, here, and here. But there's more we have to do. Um, we have to save the city from urban distress. Um, you can see we have to fill in the space that the uh whatchamacallit uh that that the uh is being pointed to by this tile. So, I've got a problem. I ultimately have to put a tile in this space to get a win. I can't do it while the wing is still here. So, or the dingling. So, I have to come up with words that will get him to move out so that we can ultimately make a word and put it here. Because to win, we have to put a letter here. we have to put a letter here. Um, and the dinglings are currently blocking our ability to do that. So, I do need to start coming up.

15:03 I do sooner than later need to use an O word to get the ghoul out of the way and more a words or B or T words to get this bat out of the way, but I can worry about that later. So, with all these things in mind, you can see there's a little bit more than just what's the best word. Um, I want to head down this way and hit this. So then we can then go up that way. And I need to think about this as well. Like if I could come up with a word that's like, you know, hey, does blah blah blah blah blah. And then if like the re, if I say, you know, um, you know, I could put an RE, then I could hit this and then re would expand that word. You know, you could put a prefix on to an existing word. That's something that's allowed. Or you could put a suffix on or you could turn a singular into a, you know, a plural if you've got an s or what have you. So, if I can't pull that off, then I probably well, I need to have something that would let me go up this way and something to go down. So, I maybe would do a BB BB and then work my way over because I ultimately have to work my way all the way over here to get to this and get to this space as well. So, maybe I need to be thinking about a B word that lets me go down that way and a word that has A in it that lets me go up that way or vice versa. But remember, as we head up, we'll also have to have a word that goes through here to hit that spot.

16:17 Yikes. So, what am I going to do? I remember and I got to use this U. Although, it's not if we fail to use this U, it's not the end of the world. We'll only lose one point. It would have been worse not to use the B because we would have lost three points. Now, another thing I should say, folks, the contents of these bags, the villain bag has one of all 26 letters from A through Z are in here. Although, as part of setup, you can see some tiles were removed. This setup here said we had to remove eight tiles. And remember, this is the counter of the game. So the 26, we removed eight. That means we only have 18 rounds before we run out of tiles. And the ones that were removed, we don't know what they are. And now I should say, folks, I'm playing a prototype now. The rules are still in a bit of flux. I asked, were these supposed to be removed face up or face down? So we can strategize, so we can know if the if the M is still in here.

17:10 We don't know if it's in here or not. So far, they're they're kind of they're not quite sure which way they want to lean. Me personally, I would like to know what's here so I can know what's coming because I can know what's coming from my teammate because in the same way we know exactly what's in everybody's bags. Although it's not A through Z. Our bags are a little different. Let me put it on screen. There's a little play down there in the bottom right corner of the screen. In everybody's bag, we have three A's, two E's, two N's. You can see we do not have a J or a K. Um, but we have two ins, two O's. We don't have a Q. There's only one Q in the whole game and it's in here. Unless, of course, it's already gone. See, it'd be nice to know if that Q was gone because if Q was still coming, I'd probably be worried about how to use this U. Although, remember, I have to use the U. I'm just throwing it out there. My vote, um, uh, Adam's Apple, publisher of this game, is these should be face up so we can do more long-term strategy, but I know you don't want there to be analysis paralysis. It could go either way.

18:09 Anyway, sorry folks. The uh situation is although one thing you can see every player has one asterisk which is a wild. My asterisk hasn't come out. Their asterisk hasn't come out. I never know what my teammate has drawn. I never know what they're going to play. But you know, as there's more words up here and more options down here, we can start to triangulate on words that might make sense. But anyway, I'm all by myself here. What am I going to do? Um I if I want to use that U and I want to head down this way. Um, B O U D bowed. B O W. Um, oh my gosh. Oh, wait. And let's not forget these. Let's not forget these. Like I've got Oh, P R I V. Um, I don't have a private. I don't, you know, um, although I do have D R I V.

18:59 So, maybe I should throw that I up there. It's never a bad idea because remember, we're all strategizing to ourselves. We can only talk about what we can see, not about what we might want to do. I'm going to throw an I up here. It's never a bad idea. So, if they throw an E or the asterisk, we could get drive. Although, wait, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no. Drive doesn't do me any good because it doesn't come off of this, right? I need to be thinking about the B or the A or the T. How am I going to work that in? All right. Uh, so we got a BR. BR R I D. Hey, you know what? Let's go for bride. Let's go for broke. Here's what I'm going to throw in cuz I'm thinking we could get the BR ID if my teammate throws an E. And you can see in his bag there are two E's and we haven't seen any of them yet. All he's thrown out so far is an R&D. Now, as the game goes on, you can make more informed decisions about what your teammates have because you can at a glance see what they've played. Anyway, so I'm going to throw in DI and we'll see if we can um What was he even trying to do? Oh, bride. Bride or bribe or something or bripe. Uh, well, it doesn't matter. These aren't in there. Now, my teammate throws a couple in and they are revealed. They are. They threw in an A and another U. What were they thinking? All right, folks. Now, it's time to put our thinking hats on.

20:20 We've got access to these and these and this. These all move up here. And now we have an extra complication. If we don't use this U, we lose it. No big deal. But if we don't make a long enough word, say I only end up doing a threeletter word, right? Or I only use three of these letters. Well, that's okay. Um, but next round, we're going to put four more out, right? Um, and if we don't use all the letters, if we ever have at the end of a round more than six leftover letters that we didn't use, if we have seven or eight that we didn't use and they do start to back up, we have to throw those letters away. Starting with the highest value letters and when they go away, we lose those points. So, we are always incentivized to come up because we if we don't use these, we're going to be overloaded with letters pretty soon. So now the E did not come out. Um but I still want to use this U.

21:23 Although if I don't it's not the end of the world. It's only one point lost. [snorts] Um what are we going to do? We have we have two A's, two U's, and an I and a bunch of other stuff. Diary. No, we don't because we don't have a Y. We have a V. Darn it. But again, I got to keep thinking about this. We have to expand from there, right? Um, so I I gotta stop thinking about Brave. It's gone. It's gone. Just start thinking about these vowels. And I wish you were all here, folks, because you're all I know, frantically typing into the comments right now. It's so obvious, right? If I just want to get this done because I have to hit this before I have to this. And if and if I can use um you know, uh let's see, ghoul. So I I will get these things hopefully moved out of the way because I got to get them moved out of the way.

22:10 Um, and if I don't, if I'm still waiting for this move out of the way, then I'll probably start because ultimately I do have to go this way and head over here to hit this space and that space. So, I can strategize long term. But, um, ba uh, B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B A A I B b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b. No, bade. No, ba. Is ba a word? I mean, you know, like a you like a a 144 baud modem. Is ba a word? I feel like it is. And this isn't bad because I use the U. It's a decent length word. It's going to be a decent amount of points. And starting a word with a D is going to make it easy to head off in this direction. And I've still got my potential for drive to drive my way to central Wordopouloolis.

22:56 Let's go with that. Let's go with baud. All right. Now, here's the deal. If you're not sure if what you've come up with is a word, because it's normal Scrabble rules, you can't use abbreviations. Um, you can't use proper names. You know, things that would be capitalized. It whatever you use has to be in a dictionary. Interestingly, the game is pretty forgiving. You can uh use any dictionary you want. When Jen and I were playing, she had a word that is um it's very common in French and whatnot, but it's unused in English, but it's a word she and her fellow glass artists use all the time. It's the French word for glass, I think, is what it was. and she's like, "I don't know if this is, we are all English speakers, but we use this all the time. I don't know if it'd be in an English dictionary." Now, what you're allowed to do is you are allowed to check the dictionary once per mission to check one thing. So, I could go online to, you know, the Oxford English or Mariam Web or whatever. I could go look up baud right now, but that would be it. We'd only get to look up one word. At the end of the game, if you have successfully completed all your objectives before time ran out, um you then have to go back and say, "What about those iffy words?" And you look them up at the end. If it turns out any of them were fake or not in the dictionary, that's an instant loss. So, it's a gamble, but I'm pretty sure I have no idea what baud stands for, but I mean, I've used it a billion times in my life. I feel like, you know, back in the

24:27 day of 144 and, you know, 288 mod ba 28 baud modems. Ba's a word, isn't it? I'm gonna say it is because that's too good to be able to go to drive on over or, you know, and and you know, drive could be the first and then if I get some, I could turn it into driven because again, you can put suffixes and then you score the whole word again and can travel even further. So, I'm going for baud. That's my choice. Oh, anyway. Uh, you know, we we we looked at we said, "Okay, Jen swore this was an English word." I said, "There's no way that's an English word. It's a French word." And so we looked in the dictionary and

25:00 telling stories.

25:01 Oh, my wife just walked in and she could hear me downstairs shouting about this story.

25:06 The rules say you can use any dictionary you want. And it turns out any modern diction, what was the word?

25:11 Ver.

25:11 Ver R E, which is the French word for glass, is not an English word these days,

25:17 back in the day. But I found a 1907 edition of the Oxford English dictionary that said ver was an English word in the 1500s. And so Jen said, "That's it. Any dictionary we want, including dictionaries that are over a century old." So that's how we won that game because Jen was able to pull the ve out

25:40 and saying that it had become obsolete after the 1500s.

25:42 Yeah, exactly.

25:43 But it's not obsolete because I just used it.

25:45 Yes, Jen has br is bringing Ver back. I've refreshed it.

25:48 All right. But anyway, I just went for ba and I, you know, like like a baud modem. Remember, Jen doesn't even know what I'm talking about. She might call a dictionary on that.

25:56 I was going to say ba ba. Body.

25:58 Um,

25:59 your body behavior.

26:00 Well, yeah, that Oh, that'd be a way we can expand it later if a Y ever comes up.

26:03 Body is B- A W D Y.

26:05 I think you're right, actually. Um, anyway, folks, Jen has something to say. Hold on. So, anyway, story time over. This is what we're going with. That is 1, two, three, four, five, six, seven points. Uh, so we're up to 12 of the 50 points we have to, but we haven't done any objectives yet. And we'll find out at the end if this is actually a legit English word. Fingers crossed it's not just some geek speak. Um, right. So, um, we didn't lose any letters. We aren't overloaded on letters. We are carrying these over to the next round. Oh, but wait. Don't forget rule G. In this game, we used an A. We used a U. So, the uh, Wingdings are going to be on the move hopefully. So, first of all, let's see if the ghoul is on the move. They say we want to go north. They cannot go north.

26:52 So, they're still blocking us. If they would, I mean, again, there is a one a 50-50 chance if they'd gotten that. If they'd gotten that or if they'd hit it east, um I have the U. So, that is the only thing. I didn't use anything else. So, they would have moved one step. Now, let's see if the bats move. Again, 50-50 chance. And they say yes, we can go any direction they want. So, how many letters of BATS? Only one. So, they're on the way. I can now make it over here. But here's the problem. If they never move again, remember they cannot go this way. Uh, but now they can go south, east, or west. But if they were still here, by the time we make it, remember, we have to cover this space because the arrows pointing at it. And if they're out of the way, if they're in the way, we'll have to come around this way. But we can't go into space five until we've gone into space four. Remember, um, 2, three, four, and five were random. It would have been better for me if this had been two and this had been three because I could just head over to two and head over to three and hopefully by the time we get there the bats would be out of the way. But that's not how it worked in this particular mission. We got to go there and then there and then maybe there before we could go there to get there if we can't get these bats out of the way. So anyway, the bats have now moved. Uh we got rid of the so we haven't lost any points yet. That was round two. Let's go on to round three and come up with another word. And we have O. We got to put an O in there. And I've got two more letters. And again, I have no idea what my teammate is going to come up with here. Alrighty. So, um, do I have my driven yet? Do I have my D

28:22 R I V dri? E, [sighs and gasps] but still no M. And see now, you know, at some point, um, you know, we can talk about everything we can see, you know, and we can see, everybody can see D R I V um, you know, but, uh, you know, I can't say, hey, I'm thinking about playing drive, but, um, I am still thinking about, so I'm going to put the E out there because we're done. Well, you know, again, it's secret. Nobody knows. Now, everybody might figure this out at the same time and we all reveal. Hey, we all just revealed four E, which is not great. But hey, you know what? Multiple E work in a lot of words, right? So, it wouldn't be the end of the world anyway.

29:08 So, I'm definitely going to put the E out so we can do a drive. 1 2 3 4 5, which means we'll be able to head up this way um to head over this way or head up this way, this way, this way, this way to get down here to number three eventually. All right. So, but I got to put another word out. And oh, you know what? We could do drove and I could use this O and not lose a point. But we've driven. We're driving. Can you put those suffixes on drove? Droven. No, I think drove. You can't. So, if I go for drove here, I've cut this off. Droven. Droving. I I that's well we'll have to worry about that in a second because I still got to put another one up here because I also we don't have to go for the drive now because remember well this is still isn't out of the way.

30:00 So I think I'm going to wait because here's the thing if I were to put something here now this would be trapped and we've lost. I need to wait for this. I need to be using O's and U's and G's and H's and L's wherever I can so this thing will start getting out of the way so that we can save the people in this spot. stupid dingling. Um, so righty. So I've got drive or drove. Um, what else have I got? All right, I've got that W or that P or that M. So I could be thinking about other things because I could be thinking about, hey, making a word that comes up here that would then let me go over this way, make another threeletter, and then like a twoletter and then boom, a twolet here. Once this thing is eventually out of the way, I need to be thinking long term.

30:46 But we're going to wait until this gets out of the way. Um, right. Uh, right. Oh, but if he does move, if I use the OU, like drought, can we get drought? D R O U G HT. No, I I have no G's, H's, or T's. But man, drought would be a good word to get this little guy out of the way. But again, every time it's a 50-50 chance of whether they're going to move because he's trapped in three directions. So, all right. I What was I throwing? I I threw in the E. I shouldn't throw in another vowel. We have more than enough vowels. Plus, my teammate is very likely to throw vowels in as well. That's the most common thing they're going to pull out of the bag because so far they have only produced two of their 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 different vowels. They have 13 if you count Y. So, chances are they're going to throw some more vowels. And so, I'm definitely not doing Right. So, can I make good use of the W, the P, or the M.

31:48 Um, well, I mean, I I could [snorts] just do drip. Uh, and that could lead to dripping. Uh, let's see. Dr. D, right? But no, that's a that is that, you know, I don't even think drow is I mean, that's that's a fancy term, so that's not going to make it. But drown, but again, I don't have that in. I could go drown. Um, I could go drop and then drop in if we get another P later on down the line. So, you know what's more useful? And you know, I also, if nothing else, I need to be throwing stuff out there so I could be clueing my teammates if I were playing multiplayer for words we could make later because sooner or later we're going to have to make something up here. Something like, you know, Java, right? After we've hit this, then J A Va puts an A here. So, we have a good shot of being able to fill this out, right? So, Java or something similar that ends with a because if it doesn't end with a, it has to come down here and then this and this have to be, you know, so like and we can't do it. We can't say, "Oh, I can't this isn't legit because that's an acronym and acronyms are not allowed. AI is not allowed." So, what twoletter words start with a a abat at at? So, we'd have to put a t here.

33:02 So, that's the thing. we need to wait for a T to show up because a T is going to go here um and end this, right? So, we could have brat or I don't know what all. Um anyway, so that's what we're thinking about long term. And the thing is after everything's public, we can talk about this strategy stuff. Well, let's think about this. I if we're ultimately going to do D R I V E, right? If if we're ultimately going to do that because it's just done and we're using enough letters that we're not carrying stuff over. Although, interestingly, we're not using any of the letters in bats or ghoul. So, these are just going to stick around for a while, but more will come out. And again, I love keeping this u for, you know, thought or whatever. I love thinking about it. Um, so if that's the case, if I'm leaving these and plus whatever else is going to come up, what what you know like um, you know, uh, soup, like I get the s, we have a, we have soup, right, as a potential. Um, but again, if we're going to have the e here and we want to finish a word that ends with e, what has an o and ends with e? We could be talking about that. And all this is what I'm thinking about to decide which of these consonants to throw in there. And now again, I'm sure um you know, Scrabble Masters would be able to figure it out.

34:22 I can't. I am not good at word games, folks. I'm just telling you right now. But these are all the kind of things you need to strategize about. And I just want to get something out there so we can actually reveal everything. And then we could really start strategizing about what could come here, what letters should we save for a future round and stuff like that, right? You know what? I I just can't stop thinking about soup. So, or or a pus or whatever. All right. So, anyway, that's it. I have picked my two and these were the ones that were left over and this is the evil one. And so, my teammate says, "Oh, you know, I didn't have to think very hard about it all. I just went with an L and an A." Okay. And so, we are in the situation now, folks. If we don't use a long enough word, we are going to have leftover letters and we have to start throwing them away. And the first thing that would get thrown away is this four point V and we'd lose four points. And remember, we have to get 50. So all my plans for drive have now truly expanded because this is a lot of stuff here. So anyway, it's at this point that I can just go for drive, but we're not getting stuff done. So, and again, in a perfect world, we'll use this OU and get this little ghosty out of the way because what we really need to do is have this ghost kind of move over here and then move up out over here because it's just going to be um you know, a bother. So, d o u doug d uh do d o u g. No, we have a u g. Of

35:54 course, we don't. Of course, we don't. What other vowels? D E Oh, D like D E A L. That's easy. So, deal. Deal. Deep. D E A P. No. Dr. Oh, Dr. R. Yeah. Yeah. So, Dr. Oh my gosh. D. [sighs and gasps] Um. All right. Deprive. D P R I V. Please. Is there an E? HOW IS THERE NO E? How is there no second E for deprive? I feel deprived. I feel very smart that I came up with that. Um, and Jen is like trying to help out, but

36:41 I thought maybe you had an E under there that you

36:43 No, that is the right. H, [sighs] but now I want to save that. But again, another thing, I know this would be worth, you know, but my teammate did not give me any or didn't throw out. I mean, if they had thrown out there wild, but they just spat it out too late. Um, I would totally put that as the E there and get a huge letter. That'd be a lot of points. It would give us, you know, multiple ways to expand up and out. But I just got to let it go. Deprive. Um, DL Douse. No, D. How you spell? D E L O U. Again, we don't have S's. Uh, Delorean. No, Delorean's a proper name. Um, De V Deve. Nope. That's a board game publisher. Dev Devour.

37:32 Oh my goodness, folks. I think that's it. I don't think I'm going to come up with anything better than that. If you do, you let me know. But that's it. That's perfect. So, folks, we have hit our first objective, which they go up here. You can see their spaces. If you have to hit like all them in a row, you keep track of them up there. We have devoured that first um point of interest. We have scored 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 points going from 12 to 22. I'm feeling pretty good about myself. Feeling carefree. Okay. And right how many ghoul there's one two ghou. Right. So we only did two. So again we have a 50-50 chance of them busting out of there. So let's do it to it. and they say they want to go east. So they're moving u bip bop. So they're blocking our way here, but they're on their way now.

38:28 So here's my problem. I didn't think about this when I came up with baud. Can you deba something? I don't think you can. You probably can't put a suffix on baud. So we cannot expand up from baud to get over here. We have to wait for this thing to get even further out of the way because we have to expand up from here to get over there. Oh dear, that baud. It might be the doom of us all. But in the meantime though, I'm going to take a win while I've got it. Okay, I've done got my first objective. Hooray. And did I use any bats? B A Ts. No, we didn't. So, the bats are still just hanging out here in their causing trouble spot. Okay, so we got our points. We've got some motion. We didn't lose anything. We move on to the next round where the letter of the day is R.

39:14 R. And I've got two new letters. It is an I and an E except after C. My oppon my teammate is going to throw a couple in. Um, and we can start figuring out what do we want to end. I ending with a U that I don't know about, but ending with an R I feel like we can come up with. I mean, hell, heck, I'm sorry. There's liar right there. L I A R. That's an easy one. Then we can head off in that direction, that direction, or that direction. So, we're already set. So, I could be thinking about strategically how to set myself up for the future still, right? And if I do liar, that's just going to be this moving once. And it could move back into position. So, that's kind of scary, too. Um, so what are we going to do?

40:00 I'm not quite sure. But if this b if this can just move one more at that point that's when we want to put a word like this because as soon as we put a word here this can't go back right. So oh where were they? Were they here? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were. So we need to move a little bit more east. They can't move north. They could move south but ultimately they got to go one more east and then we can do the java or the lava and oh la. So if we hold on see because remember right now while I'm think I c I can't talk about what I've got I cannot talk about but I can talk about what I can see and I can see in an L and an A. If we get a V and put it right there we've got this set and then we have an A here and we can get something um you know PLA N something. We have a plan, folks. Or, you know, once this thing gets out of here, because once it's there and we put the the lava there, it can't move back in. And then once it eventually moves north or south, we can go with that. Or maybe there's a threeletter word that ends with a. There must be, but I'm not going to think about it right now. So, this is all the stuff I'm thinking about as we move into the next round. And I've got to put two of these into the pot. Two more coming from my teammates. And then we really start strategizing as we try to be the defenders of the dictionary. Now folks, I think I'm going to stop right there because you have a pretty good idea of how this game plays. And if you'd like to hear some final thoughts, first of all, please remember this is a sponsored preview. And with that out of the way, oh folks, I did not expect this game to

41:32 be this good. I'll be honest right up front because I've said it before and I'll say it again. I don't like word games. I don't know how many times I can keep saying that with a straight face though because many years ago um well actually many years ago I got into modern board gaming because I was looking for a copy of Travel Scrabble to play while my wife and I were on a road trip. Couldn't find it and instead found Pandemic and the rest is history. But I did ultimately pick up a copy of Travel Scrabble and I still got to this day and we never play it because I always thought I didn't like word games cuz I'm terrible at them. They give me so much stress and consternation and I've played with other people who just like, you know, just blitz through them and they're always a struggle. But then many years ago, a deck builder came out called paperback and I thought, "Wow, this is really cool mixing word um games with uh deck building. Still don't know if I like it because I really have a problem, you know? I mean, it's just I mean, my my brain just freezes up when it comes to word games and I I get really frustrated and I feel dumb. But, uh, Paperback had a brilliant co-op mode that was absolutely phenomenal, as did its sequel, hardback, as did his further sequel, Paperback Adventures. And I thought, wow, okay, you make a word game cooperative, and now I feel like, well, you know what, even though I'm not being that very doing much contributing to the words, I can still contribute to the overall strategy of the game. I contribute to the deck building or, you know, whatever it might be. and and then comes along to fence of the dictionary

43:04 and I want to try it because from the ground up it's cooperative. It's basically cooperative Scrabble with superheroes. Um which is everything I could hope it would be. Um because you know depending on which mission you're playing and the game comes with a metric boatload of missions. It's just got a ton of variety. uh there are going to be all kinds of interesting strategic decisions that you can you know cogitate on in addition to figuring out the ideal world. You can come up with the best words in the world, but if they don't let you travel through this maze of a city to get to your objectives when you need to or to um you know uh you know give yourself more opportunities to not get you know stuck in a corner. Well, you're not going to last very long and uh so I love that. And you know the way this has turned into a cooperate game where everybody starts each round with their own okay I've got my little things but I'm not trying to come up with just a word for myself. I'm trying to figure out based on the word the letters we did not use in the last round based on the letter that we have to use because if we don't use it we lose points and based on what I've got here and based most importantly on what I think you might have because we can't we we cannot look at anybody else's letter rack but we can look at the board and we can check the little cheat sheet we've got to see oh you have never used your why I don't see your why anywhere out here. We used my Y a while ago, but we haven't used your why. We haven't you and you must have

44:35 gone through half of your sack now. There's as decent a chance as not that you've got your why sitting on your rack and maybe you'll put it out because if you do because we all have to decide in secret, right, which letter are we going to add? You know, the player one and player two adds theirs. And then once everybody's added what they're going to add, we reveal them all and I say, "Yes, there's a Y. LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO. I PUT THAT plus these two letters plus that. Um, it'll be very dreary, but that's going to get us exactly where we need to go. It'll be perfect in such a dreary way. I'm just looking because I see DR and I'm I'm managing, you know, you get the idea. That is so cool that um you know because I mean it lends into you know elements of you know the equivalent of card counting and probability um you know management and you know maze traversal and resource control and most importantly word generation. And you know even if you're not the best chances are once all the tiles have been revealed and we've got those letters we've got the letters left over. We got this.

45:41 Plus, we've got all these letters here because like Scrabble, we have to expand. We could say, "Oh, this is our perfect time to squeeze the ghoul over into a corner so we can trap them because we have an objective to trap the ghoul or to get to this or whatever it might be. Now is the time to do this word." But somebody else say, "But we can do this other word over here and it'll get us out to the other board so we can start spreading out over there, but we can only choose one word per round." We score the points for it. We move on. we maybe lose some points. If we don't use enough letters and we don't have room to carry them over, we will start losing points and that will happen sooner or later. Um, but uh it's it's all about the risk mitigation of what's going to come out next as we then on the next round draw two more and in secret oh here's my why. Start figuring out right what are we going to put out there? Man, I don't know what to put out there. I can't see any words at all.

46:32 Well, still I have to put you know if if you're playing three or four players I have to put one out. If you're playing a two-player solo game, I have to put two out. You could also decide, well, you know what? What's going to be the most useful letter, right? Um, you know, what's just going to have the be most general function so that somebody else who's smarter at word games than me can put this together. So, it's freaking cool. Um, you know, my wife and I, we've only played now um five missions, I think, of the 17, and they've all been interesting. You've got like objectives where you always have to keep making longer and longer words. So start with a short, then a four-letter word, then a fiveletter word, and a six. Can we come with Okay, can we come with a seventh? No. Then okay, we're going to get um you know a a mark against us. It means the bomb is one step closer. It's a tick and the bomb is one step closer to going off. But then we can go back to a three and start working our way up again. So that's a whole strategy. Um, there are other strategies having to do with the different villains and whatnot and the different ways that these missions combine these different rule sets to create new um, you know, challenges to overcome. It's just so smart. If you have anybody in your life who likes word games, you have to check this out. But by the same token, if you have people in your life like me and Jen who think, "Yeah, you know what? We don't really dig word games. We always just feel really stupid." But we we really like cooperating with people. We really like, you know, the idea of saving a city from super villains. You know, we like all

48:02 that stuff. Maybe those people we pulled in as well. This is just I mean, well, what an amazing gateway game. What a game to show to your friends and loved ones who say, "Why do you play all those games? Isn't it all just shoots and ladders and Monopoly? What's wrong with you?" You can say, "Oh, yeah. Let me show you what you're missing. Remember playing Scrabble back when you were a kid? Let me show you what a modern game is like. And then you bring this out. Oh my gosh, you're going to be making board game conversions left, right, and center. But even if that's if you don't need a new gateway game to have in your arsenal, you're just looking for a great cooperative game that happens to be a word game, Defenders of the Dictionary has you set. Oh my goodness, I am so impressed by this. My wife, we have played several. I I can't even remember all the different word games we played over the years. Uh, a lot of them don't hit for us because they don't have a co-op mode or, you know, the co-op just feels kind of tacked on, but this is built from the ground up and it just works well. Who knew cooperative Scrabble with superheroes could be one of the best games of the year. I don't know, folks. I'm not sure if this is coming out in 26 or 27, but um, you know, this might be my wife's favorite game of the year. Uh, you know, if you watch, if you just didn't skip right to final thoughts, you'll notice she kept coming in. She was kind of jealous that she wasn't here um helping me because she's so excited about continuing to play this game. And um you know, I cannot think of higher praise than that.

49:29 Folks, that was the preview for Defenders of the Dictionary. Thanks so much for watching. Have a very nice day. Talk to you later. So long. Bye-bye.