If you've read The Game Report for a while, you know that I like word games (even though I rarely find opponents willing to play them with me). I'm delighted when a new one crosses my path which isn't merely a retread of old ideas. Tisby is such a game.
A homebrew production, Tisby wouldn't earn a second— or even a first— glance in a store. The plain white box with spare, amateurish green artwork and lettering fails to entice on any level. The components inside are consistent with its outward appearance— oaktag gameboards and privacy screens, cardboard letter chits, Xeroxed rules. Gameplay involves consulting tables far too many times. This isn't a polished, professional job from either a production or development perspective. So now that we've established that it will never be much of a financial success in its current form, we can get on to the gameplay. Fortunately, Tisby's outlook here is brighter.
Each of up to four players gets a privacy screen, game board, and bag of 40 letter chits (all the same color in my set, but the second edition promises to color-code them by player). The boards are 7x7 grids with special squares in the upper right, left center, and bottom right. A game consists of six rounds in which players race to construct crossword grids from identical sets of letters. These sets are determined by rolling dice and consulting the tables I mentioned earlier. There are two tables, and a die must be rolled twice for each table, generating two sets of eight letters each. By generating sets this way, the system virtually guarantees that a complete crossword can be created each round while preserving enough variety to keep each game different. I recommend adding a second die of a different color to your game so you can generate the sets a little faster. It may seem trivial, but trust me— the die rolling slows things down enough to make it worthwhile.
One letter is always placed on the "home base" square, second from the right on the bottom row. Another is placed in one of the six anchor squares on the left side of the grid (a different square is used each round). With identical setups, players hide their grids behind privacy screens and race to make a crossword with the remaining letters. When one player decides she's finished, she flips over the timer. She's also required to watch the timer and give the other players a reasonably accurate ten second warning or else lose a point— a nice touch.
Scoring heavily rewards the connection of the two starting letters. Players earn a point for each letter used. If the aforementioned connection was made, additional bonuses may apply. First, the base score is doubled to two points per tile. If all tiles were used, there's a five point bonus. There's also a five point bonus for each covered special square in the top row, with a 20 point bonus for covering the upper-right corner square. All words must connect at least indirectly to one of the two starting tiles.
As I mentioned earlier, the process of consulting tables to determine the starting letters is tedious. This would sink a game from a major company (well, maybe not one from Avalon Hill). But this isn't from a professional game company, and isn't unreasonable given the price of admission.
The important thing is that once the letters have been selected, the game is fun to play. I've always been partial to anagrams and crosswords, and Tisby incorporates both in a fast-paced game in which everyone plays simultaneously. As in Take it Easy, all players are working with exactly the same set of tiles. In Tisby, this completely eliminates the luck factor, making it a game of pure skill— not just in making words out of the letters, but in positioning them for the maximal score under time pressure.
Tisby is certainly no classic, and lacks the synergistic brilliance of last issue's word game find (Scrosswords). But if you don't mind the low-budget production values or a little tedium between rounds of play, Tisby offers wordsmiths a chance to go head to head on equal footing.