Five-Dollar Words

There’s an old folk game played on car trips, where you come up with a word using the letters on a license plate, but you must use them in order – BRT can be answered with barrette, for example, but not antidisestablishmentarianism. That often-maddening restriction is at the heart of this persnickety bauble.

Given the same three letters in the same order, players will each conjure up a word. You’ll score points for its length, for how many times each of the three letters appears, and the use of difficult letters – your Qs, your Xs, your Js, and your so-forths. Each round will specify a type of word – for example, a noun or a verb – and your score will be doubled if it falls into that category… but only if no one else at the table thought of the same word! The best score of each round wins one of the three cards. This not only removes it from future rounds but might form a set to score you extra points at the end of the game.

This is a word game for sesquipedalianists, show-offs, and pedants – where the longer and more unusual the word is, the better it’s going to score. It’s the sort of game where it’s valuable to know that “rebutter” is not a verb describing what you do when your toast fell on the floor but no one else saw it, but rather a noun for a defendant’s pleading in response to a plaintiff’s surrejoinder – and therefore it IS TOO worth double points, Susan, SO THERE.

Five-Dollar Words is the 2023 Hollandays Sale Freebie game – given out for free with orders during Hollandspiele’s big end-of-year sale. That’s the only way to get your hands on this tiny wee little baby deck of cards containing a grotesque menagerie of alphabetic monsters and delights.

—description from the publisher