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Letterflip is described as the "anyplace-anytime" word game, and it's indeed an easily portable, simple vocabulary game.
Players: 2
Playing Time: 20 minutes
Difficulty: 1 (of 10)
The Components
 Letterflip comes with:
- 2 Letterflippers
- 150 word cards
- 2 divider cards
- 1 rulebook
Letterflippers: These are the heart of the game. Each of these hard plastic devices contains everything you need to know about the word you're working on.
Each is essentially a plastic tray with twenty-seven hinged tiles in it. 26 of the tiles are labeled "A" through "Z" while the last is labeled "letter count". These tiles can either be swung up (visible) or down (not visible). Each tile also has a tab which can be pulled out of the top. Each of these tabs has four spaces on it; for the letters, each space is marked with a "*" and you use it to denote how many times a letter appears in a word; for the letter count tile each tabbed stop has a number, from "3" to "6" to mark the word length.
In addition, each Letterflipper has a slot to the side where you put in your opponent's word card. This is another good design: there are four words on each card, and you move the card down as your opponent guess words to reveal the longer ones.
Overall, the design of these flippers is quite clever. You have everything you need to list all the letters in a word, as well as the frequency of each letter. It obviates the need for paper or pencil, and thus fulfills part of the promise of the game being playable everywhere.
However, there are also some design issues: the tabs are quite tight, and thus it can take a lot of effort to pull them out, though this did get somewhat better either with either use or practice; and the hinged tiles can pop off their tracks (I did this a lot more than my wife did when I was playing, mostly when I was trying to pull the tab of a tile up; they go back in easily in any case).
Word Cards: Small cards on thin cardstock which each list four words on each side. One side is marked gold (easy), the other blue (harder). The blue cards aren't necessarily more rare words, but rather words with rarer letters, sometimes in rarer configurations.
These cards are printed black, blue, and gold, and look pretty nice despite their innate plainness.
Divider Cards: Thicker cardboard cards used to divide the word cards you've already used from those that you haven't.
Rulebook: A four-page rulebook on medium cardstock, printed full-color (but mostly black, blue, and gold). The game system is simple, and the rules describe it well.
Overall, Letterflip is very well-designed as a travel game. You could easily stuff the two flippers in a backpack and a handful of word cards in your jacket pocket and go. Overall, the design is utilitarian, though slightly plain. Other than the stiffness problems with the tabs, everything works quite well, and thus the components earn a solid "4" out of "5" for Style: well above average.
The Gameplay
In Letterflip each player takes a word card which has four words on it, lengths 3, 4, 5, and 6. The object of the game is to guess the cards on your opponent's word card before he guesses those on yours.
Setup: Each player takes a Letterflipper and flips all the letters up. He also flips the "word count" tile up and pulls the tab to set it to "3" (the length of his first word). He then takes a word card for his opponent and places it in his Letterflipper's slot, making the three-letter word initially visible.
Guessing: Each turn a player makes a guess. He can do one of three things:
- Guess a Letter. The player guesses a letter, and his opponent tells him if the letter is in the word, and if so how many times. Afterward the active player either flips the guessed letter down or else pulls the tab on the letter up to show the number of times it's used.
- Guess a Word. The player guesses a word, and his opponent tells him if he's right or not. If he's right, afterward the active player resets his Letterflipper to the original position and increases the letter count tab by one.
- Guess a Position. Only after he has all his letters, a player may guess the position of a particular letter, and his opponent tells him rather he's right or not. There's no way to mark this on the Letterflipper.
If a player guessed anything right, he gets to go again; else, it's now his opponents turn.
Winning the Game: The first person to guess his final (6-letter) word wins.
Relationships to Other Games
Letterflip is a letter-guessing word game similar in some ways to Hangman or the TV show Wheel of Fortune. The main difference between this and more common games is that you're told how many times a letter appears, but not where it appears in the word.
Thus, after you've guessed sufficient letters, Letterflip becomes a letter-organizing word game most similar to Anagrams; you have the letters and you just need to figure out how they're ordered.
The Game Design
In most letter-guessing word games, you can start to make educated guesses pretty quickly about what other letters might be in a puzzle. The specific locations of letters can tell you a lot about the overall structure of a word, and thus the game quickly moves from random guessing to educated guessing. Unfortunately, the same isn't (very) true in Letterflip. Once you guess a letter it tells you fairly minimal things about the word overall (maybe some hints at what dipthongs might be in the word, but little more). The only exception is when you find multiple letters in a word. The end result is that for much of the game, the guessing can be pretty random.
The letter-organizing phase is the only part where things get more strategic. Clever players will be able to guess things immediately, while others might need a letter location or two for things to fall into place. However, this can also result in deadtime as players try to organize the letters in their word again and again; a timer would have helpd for this.
I also find it a little unfortunate that the gameplay discourages the jumps of logic that determine the winners in most letter guessing games. Because you get an extra turn whenever you guess something right, there's zero incentive to guess a word before you know every single letter (and possibly where they all are, if you want to be that thorough).
If I were going to grade Letterflip as a game overall, I'd probably give it a "2" out of "5" for Substance: it's pretty light, even for a family game, with much more emphasis on luck than strategy (or word knowledge). However, I'm also aware that some of the limitations of the game are a direct result of choosing to make it an "anytime-anyplace" travel game. There just isn't an easy way to do things like mark word position in this situation, and the game is overall a pretty clever design for those limitations. On that basis I've given it an average Substance rating of "3" out of "5".
Conclusion
Although not recommended for homeplay, Letterflip does work well as a clever word game designed for travel. Its plastic "Letterflippers" and the word cards are really all you need to play, and thus it's both easily portable, and won't get hurt if its jostled, dropped, or otherwise disturbed during a plane, boat, railroad, or car trip.
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