The Components

The core coolness of Unspeakable Words comes in its components and their Cthulhoid theming.

Cards: 96 letter cards, each printed on medium-weight linen-textured cardstock. These come in a relatively normal distribution of letters, from A to Z.

The neat aspect of the cards is that each depicts one of 26 Lovecraftian monstrosities in fun cartoony art by Tony Steele. As an additional humorous twist each card also depicts an object that you'd more commonly expect to see associated with the letter.

"A" for example, is for Azathoth, who is holding an apple. "P", meanwhile, is for an oozy Proto-Shaggoth, with a very nervous looking penguin standing in front of it. Each card also depicts the card's value, which we'll get back to.

Die: A 20-sided die, which is used to test sanity. It's unfortunately a clear die with black ink, and those are never that easy to read.

Cthulhu Idols: These are little plastic Cthulhu idols with beady black eyes, which are worth the cost of the game alone for any Lovecraftian fan. As you'll see, you expend idols to retain your sanity. They're totally overproduced, but entirely cool too.

Generally Playroom Entertainment overproduces its card games. However this a Playroom game where, even if overproduced, I was entirely grateful and appreciative of all the components. Thus it earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Gameplay

Unspeakable Words is a word game, and the mechanism is pretty familiar and common: you draw a hand of seven cards, you form a word from some of them, you score your points, and then you draw back up to seven.

Except you also have to roll for Sanity loss every turn.

Creating Words: Each card depicts a letter of the alphabet, and you use those to form English words. Notably (and to my disappointment) there's no list of Lovecraftian words that you can use. Doubtless, many players will want to add one.

The biggest change from normal word games is that the letters have really weird values. They're dependent upon the number of angles in the word, so an "H" (with four angles) is worth 4 points, while "S" and "O" are both worth nothing.

The second big change is that each word can only be used once in the game.

Rolling for Sanity: After you form a word, you must see if you lose sanity. You roll the 20-sided die and if your roll the value of your word or higher, you're safe, but if you roll less than the value of your word you lose one of your 5 Cthulhu idols, and are thus one step closer to insanity.

Whether you make the sanity roll or not, you get to score your word--except in the case of the last round.

Winning the Game: You automatically lose the game if you lose your last Cthulhu idol.

You win the game if you score a word that puts you over 100 points and you make the sanity roll on that last play. If you don't you earn nothing, lose an idol, and can try again next round with a new word if you're still in the game.

Relationships to Other Games

Unspeakable Words is clearly a word game, like Scrabble and so many others. However the sanity roll and the strange valuation do a lot to change the game. They make it more likely that you'll score short, easy words. After all "HI" is worth 8 points, which is just 8% of what you need to win. This is a nice variation from normal word play because it creates a word game that won't automatically be won by the word memorizers.

The Game Design

I was prepared not to like this game. The Cthulhu theming is pretty light, and shows up mainly in the excellent components, while the sanity mechanism is a bit silly.

Surprisingly, I liked both the game and the sanity mechanism. On the one hand it really doesn't matter how big your word is. There's slightly less expected sanity loss for smaller words, but it's not a dramatic difference; on average you'll lose about 5 points of sanity about when you score 100 points.

However even knowing that the mechanism is exciting. It really encourages you to spell smaller words and to not take "risks" (even though they're not really risks, on average). This is a neat mechanic that adds to the game.

Beyond that, it's a pretty average variant of word games, good mostly for its theming. I've thus given it a Substance of "3" out of "5".

Conclusion

If you like Cthulhoid things, Unspeakable Words is probably worth picking up. It's got neat theming and neat bits that will warm the heart of any Lovecraftian fan. Just make sure you add a list of Lovecraftian gods, so that you can spell "Yig" (9 points) and "Hastur" (15 points).