SNAP Review – Word Fluxx

Anitra, we’ve always loved word games.

We have! We especially love how all different kinds of word games focus on different goals. Some of them are cooperative, some of them are competitive, but they all encourage us to use our brains and expand our vocabularies.

What if I told you that this week we’re going to talk about a word game with more goals than you’ve ever seen before?

I suppose I’d say… This is a SNAP review for Word Fluxx!

Game

Word Fluxx is a game for up to 6 players, ages 8 and up. Like other Fluxx games, it was designed by Andrew Looney and it’s published by Looney Labs.

Art

So let’s talk about the art in Word Fluxx.

This version of Fluxx is based around words, so the only art is large colorful letters. They do get a 3D treatment so they feel a little bit more substantial.

That’s it! Everything else is just words on cards telling you what to do.

Mechanics

Let’s talk about the mechanics of Word Fluxx. If you’ve ever played any of the Fluxx games, you kinda already know how to play this one.

No, you definitely do.

But if you haven’t, here’s a quick run-down.

Fluxx is a game where the rules change as you play. When you start, this card is on the table, and it tells you how to play. Draw a card, Play a card.

There are four types of cards in this game: New Rules, Keepers, Goals, and Actions.

New Rules

New Rules are exactly what they sound like. When you play one of these cards, you change some aspect of how the game works. Maybe drawing more cards or maybe playing more cards. You might add a limit to how many cards you can have in your hand, or a limit to how many cards you can have out on the table.

New Rules stay in play until they’re either replaced by a competing New Rule or discarded by an Action card.

Actions

Speaking of which, Action cards are one-time use: play them and immediately do what they say. These often involve discarding rules or shuffling around cards on the table or even in your hands, sometimes even affecting the Goals that are in play.

Keepers & Goals

Let’s talk about Keepers and Goals.

Keepers are characters or items that get played in front of you, from your hand. In this game, each Keeper is an individual letter of the English alphabet.

Each Goal card sets a win condition for the game, and there is usually only one active Goal at a time.

In most other Fluxx games, a Goal shows a combination of two or three Keepers, and if any player has the Keepers to fulfill the active Goal, they immediately win.

This is a little different in Word Fluxx – some Goals ask for specific letters, but most of them want you to build a word that meets specific criteria, like 5 or more different letters, or a word that contains a silent letter, or a three letter acronym.

And there’s one other twist to this – before playing, the group can agree on using the Meta Rule “Keep Going”. Instead of a player immediately winning the game when they achieve the goal, players discard the appropriate Keeper cards and take the Goal that they’ve won. And then it’s the next player’s turn.

When your time has run out and you need to finish the game, the player who has accumulated the most Goals wins. Or, like us, you can play to a Goal threshold.

Oh, and if you can’t get anyone to play word games with you, there are rules for a solo mode. But we’ll leave that for you to discover on your own.

Expectations

So Anitra, what did we expect from Word Fluxx?

We’re lukewarm on Fluxx games usually. I don’t hate them but I don’t love them either. I *do* like word games, and now that most of our kids are teenagers, they can meaningfully compete in games of coming up with words and spelling them.

We expected that this would feel like a typical Fluxx game, and I was hopeful it wouldn’t have any of the overtly-mean elements that often come along with the more mature themes.

Fluxx games are all over the map for me, and honestly, it doesn’t even come down to the theme most of the time. Sometimes the added mechanics just don’t do much for me, but other times, like when we reviewed Hundred Acre Wood Fluxx, the extra stuff is just great.

With Word Fluxx, I figured the game would play games (ha) with making words. And I was right!

Surprises

But there were some surprises, too. So what surprised you?

It surprised me how much Word Fluxx felt like a classic word game, at least to me. You’re working with just a few letters at a time and trying to come up with a word that meets the requirements. Feels a little bit like a Scrabble, or an Illiterati.

For me, I have kind of a lot of thoughts here. I was actually kind of surprised how hard it ended up being to spell words.

In almost every word game, you’re ending up with at least four to six letters to work with. Here, it was common for someone to play a rule that limited the number of keepers, consequently letters, that you could have.

But I loved some of the goals, like having to have enough letters to support two words that rhyme at the same time, or things like that. They’re really clever!

I also liked how much more free-form the goals ended up being in this game. In most other Fluxx games you just need to have a certain set of specific cards to achieve a goal. But in this, almost any card could be used in fulfilling almost any goal.

I also really liked the meta rule, because I had forgotten it existed. This isn’t the first game that has had this. With the meta rule, you can pick a number of goals and play until someone gets that many goals – like I said before.

This made the game feel a lot less cutthroat, because an opponent getting a goal wasn’t immediately a loss for everybody else at the table. The game actually had an ebb and a flow to it – like a lot of other games do, but Fluxx games usually don’t – because once someone had one goal, everyone knew that person was a little bit closer to winning.

But it also meant they were usually out of letters for a while.

Right! And that was actually a really good thing in this game.

Recommended?

So, would we recommend Word Fluxx?

I think yes, we would recommend Word Fluxx to people who really like a Fluxx game that feels like the original, and/or people who really love word games.

Looney Labs did some really fun and clever things with how they want you to put your words together for success in this game. I do think we would recommend this one for 10+. The box says 8+, but you really need a pliable word brain – I don’t know how else to say it – in order to play a game like this.

We give Word Fluxx 3½ letters out of 5.

And that’s Word Fluxx – in a SNAP!

Get it on Amazon, from Looney Labs, or at your local game store.

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The Family Gamers received a copy of Word Fluxx from Looney Labs for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?