Players: 2-6
Time: 30-90 minutes
Difficulty: 4 (of 10)

The Components

Parlay comes with a deck of 55 cards, 6 chips, a scorepad, and an instruction booklet.

Cards: These are Poker cards with a twist: each card also displays a letter and a value. The cards are printed on average-weight linen-textured stock.The artwork is pretty basic playing card artwork that's been touched up a little bit in a computer program, generally to the art's advantage. The cards overall look nice, and the letters, suits, and values are all easy to make out.

Besides the 52 normal cards and two (optional) Jokers, there's also a card depicting the order of Poker hands, which is helpful. I would have liked to have more.

Chips: Very thick plastic chips with full-color stickers on either side which say "Stay" or "Fold". The chips are quite sturdy and generally good quality.

Scorepad: A scorepad which each player uses to list his word for each round, then later mark up its value. The sheet also helpfully reminds you of various scoring elements.

Rulebook: A 12-page brown and white rulebook. It describes the special rules for scoring Parlay, then lists three Poker variants which can be used with the game. The ordering makes the rules a bit hard to follow, but it makes sense once you've read all the way through.

Overall the quality and utility of the game is pretty average, and the artwork on the cards edges the game's Style up just a tad, earning it a high "3" out of "5": slightly above average.

I was tempted to mark that score up when I saw the price for Parlay; $14 is entirely reasonable for the components.

The Gameplay

What I describe below is the simplest, "Quick Draw" variety of Parlay. There are three other variants, one of which largely mimics Texas Hold 'em play, but I was entirely happy with the Quick Draw variant which allowed for somewhat independent & thoughtful gameplay.

The object of Parlay is to earn the most points by forming good words, and possibly multiplying that through good Poker hands as well.

A Hand of Play: During each hand of play each player is dealt five cards and two community cards are placed in the middle of the table. Each player then has an opportunity to change out up to three of cards before the round is scored.

Words & Staying: Next each player must form the best word he can out of the seven available cards (his five, plus the two community cards).

As already noted each card has a letter on it, thus the player will be able to spell a 1-7 letter word. The individual letters are worth 5-35 points, depending on their difficulty of use. A good word's raw score is often 50+ points. Each player writes down his word on his scorepad.

Now each player must decide to "fold" or "stay" by playing their chip (then hiding it under their cards, so that no one else can see it yet). If a player folds, he's out of the round. He gets to mark down his raw word score as his score for the hand. If a player stays, he may get more points ... or else may lose everything.

Checking Words: Before any of the "fold" or "stay" chips are revealed, each player now announces his word and spells it, then each other player has a chance to call "bluff", meaning they think the word is made up.

If a bluff call is successful, because the word doesn't exist in your favorite dictionary, the caller gets +15 points and the person who made up a word is out of the hand.

if the bluff call is unsuccessful, because the word was real, the caller is out of the hand.

Comparing Hands: Now players reveal if they stayed in this hand. Each player who stayed gets a bonus if his word was particularly long: +15 for 5 letters, +45 for 6, +100 for 7.

Next players who stayed in compare their Poker hands. Whomever has the best hand gets a "Poker bonus"; they get the value of their word (without length bonuses) again.

Now each player who stayed compares their hand total: word score + length bonus + Poker bonus + bluff calls. The player with the highest total gets that score, while everyone else who stayed gets 0.

There's a lot of thoughtfulness and back and forth here. You might be able to win with a good word even if your Poker hand isn't good, but alternatively if you build a good Poker hand you can win on a much worse word, because it's value is effectively x2.

Winning the Game: The game ends when a player exceeds 500 points.

Relationships to Other Games

Parlay is exactly what it sounds like: a word game combined with Poker.

As a word game it falls into the same category as any number of word construction games like Scrabble, Boggle, Letterhead, and Quiddler. The word construction element is actually pretty rudimentary, but that's fine because much of the challenge of the game comes from the brinkmanship and bluffing implicit in the Poker side of things.

The Poker element covers many categories of play. The gameplay I outlined here is similar to 5-card draw, and as I already mentioned there's also a variant that plays something like Texas Hold'em. There's a few other variants too, as well as those wild Jokers, but I think they make the game increasingly chaotic. (There's also some more games at the company's website, which I haven't really looked at.)

The word and Poker elements of Parlay are well integrated.

The Game Design

When I first saw Parlay I really wasn't too impressed by the idea of putting Poker and word games together. It seemed like a poor attempt to cash in on current gaming trends. I was 100% wrong. Parlay is a well-designed word game that stands right up there with any of the classics of the genre.

As I said, most of the interesting gameplay in Parlay is centered around the decision of whether to fold or stay in a hand. You have to measure a few different things: how good your word is, how good your Poker hand is, and how that's likely to measure up to everyone else's. Stepping backward from there, that also means that any card draws that you take form an additional interesting decision, as you have to decide if you want to try and draw for a better word (and how to do so if so) or if you want to draw for a better Poker hand. There's a lot of strategies.

I was also surprised to see that "bluffing", which is to say making up a word, can work in Parlay. There's good balance for both wanting to call someone (because you need them out of the current hand lest they beat you) and not (primarily because you decided to fold and don't want to lose your otherwise guaranteed points).

To a certain extent, the scoring system is a little complex, and I'd love to see a simpler version if it were possible, but the weighting of words, Poker hands, and length bonuses is what actually makes everything work (so it might not be possible to simplify things).

I generally like word games. Scrabble and Boggle regularly get play at my house, while Quiddler also did the year I bought it and it was still new. I think that Parlay stands up to anything in the genre because of its originality and its fun brinksmanship and bluffing mechanisms which you don't tend to find in word games. As such I've given it a "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Parlay is an innovative game by newcomer Real Deal Games that mixes a word game with Poker mechanisms, brinksmanship and bluffing. The whole works together very well and results in a largely original type of gameplay that should interest any word game enthusiast who has the slightest interest in Poker as well.

Parlay is the best new word game that I've played in years.

Parlay isn't in very wide distribution right now, but you can buy it at the company's website.