Capitals and the Word Game Trap

There’s a trap to look out for when you design a word game: it can’t be about the words. That sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? But avoiding that trap has been key to the success of word games from the classic Scrabble to the recent iOS release Capitals from Nimblebit.

There’s a ready-made audience for word games, a segment of the population that loves to mess around with vocabulary. I’m one of them, and there are enough like me that Scrabble still racks up sales of two million copies a year. Not bad for a game that has been around since 1948 and seems to live on every game shelf in America.

While word love is common, though, word skill is not. Vocabulary knowledge has a steep and unforgiving curve. I know thousands more words than my daughters do, simply because I’ve been on the planet a few decades longer than they have. In a straight-up vocabulary game like Boggle, I will beat them every time — which means we don’t play a lot of Boggle around here.

The Power of the Triple Word Score

Alfred Butts saw this problem back in the forties, which is why Scrabble forces its players to use other skills as well as vocabulary. A good Scrabble player uses anagramming and strategic positioning to maximize scores and shut down opponents’ opportunities. The bingo bonus also creates an optimum word length that limits the set of words you need to learn to get the best scores.

Great Scrabble players still memorize the official dictionary, and there is still a huge gulf between casual and competitive play. But a player can use strategic skills to even up the odds against a opponent with a stronger vocabulary, and even the most casual player can rack up the occasional ego-boosting bingo or triple word score.

Casual Capitals

Capitals also uses strategic positioning, but takes a more casual approach. It gets rid of Scrabble’s scoring and focuses on an area control mechanic: you make words to claim territory and push the other player off the map.

Any word you make increases your share of territory and gives you a sense of progress. Long words are satisfying, and Capitals indulges word freaks by awarding achievements for making big words, but they are not always the most effective strategic play. The biggest plays come from finding two or three letters that remove a lot of the opponent’s territory, and it’s not that hard to find a short, common word that does the job. Word freaks still have a slight advantaged, but my ten-year-old can compete with me and have a fair shot at the win.

Capitals has a lot of other things going for it: a clean visual design, a simple tutorial, and just enough customization to let you feel you’re making the game your own. The free-to-play lives system is generous, which is good for players but may not be earning a lot of money for Nimblebit. But the real strength of the game lies in understanding a fundamental design truth: testing one skill in a game is dull, but forcing you to use two skills at once? Now you’ve got something.