Wobble Mysteries II
An asymmetric word game for a wordy mastermind and one to four clever detectives, by Jonathan Leistiko. This is the digital table: the shared screen holds the board, and everyone plays from a phone.
The story
Something strange is afoot in the town of Calder Wobblers. A devious mastermind has pulled off a cunning caper. They have a head start on you, but they have left a trail of clues. Can you decipher the clues and foil their fiendish plan before they escape?
If you are the mastermind
You are playing a one-player crossword-building word game, and your getaway needs 33 points. Every word you play is worth points — and every word the detectives crack takes those points straight back off you and hands them over. The trick is not scoring big. The trick is scoring big with words nobody can read.
If you are a detective
You have one guess a round, as a team, against a word of your choosing. What comes back is the shape of your mistake. Crack a word and its points become your case — and its tiles turn face up, which hands you letters in everything that crosses it.
A round
- The mastermind turn. Build one word from your current rack, using at least one tile already on the board. The first word of the game has to cover the middle square. Tiles go down face down, with a numbered token on the first letter pointing the way the word runs. The detectives are told how long each new word is, what it scored, and whether a blank went into it — nothing else.
- The detective turn. Pick a clue sheet, agree on a word, send it. The mastermind marks it honestly, and the round is over.
- The check. If either side is on the target or past it at the end of the round, the game ends and the higher score wins.
How a guess is answered
A box means the right letter in the right place. A line means the right letter in the wrong place. Anything else is a miss. Repeats are answered most-correct-first: against TRAVEL, a guess of STREET comes back like this.
The tiles
One hundred tiles, and they are not Scrabble's. Every vowel is worth nothing, so points come from the awkward letters.
| Points | Letters |
|---|---|
| 5 | Q, Z |
| 4 | J, X |
| 3 | K |
| 2 | F, H, V, W, Y |
| 1 | B, C, D, G, M, P |
| 0 | A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, U, and the two blanks |
Forty-eight tiles carry a piece of evidence — a bomb 💣, blackmail ✉, poison ☠ or dirty money 💰. They score nothing extra here; they are what the character powers will hang off.
At this table
- The mastermind's chair can be empty. Switch on the house takes the chair and the server builds the crossword instead, at one of three skill levels. It plays for points it thinks it can defend.
- Two racks, alternating. Seven tiles each, and no moving tiles between them.
- Words are checked against a 168,000-word list, so the mastermind cannot invent one. Holding the detectives' guesses to the same list is optional and off by default.
- No character powers and no charges yet. The six masterminds and six detectives from the rulebook are the next thing to build.
- A pass exists for the mastermind, for the rack that simply cannot reach the board.
- The target is a dial, and it decides who wins. Simulated games (house mastermind against a solver that reads the scores and propagates letters across the crossword) go 80% to the mastermind at 33, even money around 45, and 97% to the detectives at 75 — because the crossword grows, crossings multiply, and each solve leaks letters into its neighbours. A human table is worse at that bookkeeping than a machine, which is why 33 stays the default and 45 is there for a sharp group.
- Nought-point words are information plays. With vowels worth nothing, a word can score nothing — solving it pays nothing but still turns its tiles face up, which is often worth more than a point. For tables that would rather every sheet paid something, a solved clue always pays 1 is a house rule in the lobby.