Gamehelpspellcrafter

Spellcrafter is a card drafting game where players select letters and special modifier cards to spell the most valuable words across four rounds. Bonus points are awarded for word length and for staying in a single suit.

How to play

At the start of each round, each player is dealt a hand of 8 cards. One card is then dealt face up to the center of the table: this is a shared letter known as the jumper card.

Players look at the cards in their hand and select one card to keep by placing it in a pile face down in front of them. Once everyone has selected a card, players pass their remaining cards to the player on their left, face down.

Players repeat this process until they have a pile of 7 selected cards. The final card in each players' hand is discarded instead of drafted.

Once drafting is complete, players must each craft a word of three or more letters using some or all of their selected cards and the jumper shared card. It is not mandatory to use the jumper or special cards.

Each player then scores points for the cards they used to craft their word (plus any bonuses), then discards all cards face-up to create a discard pile beside the deck.

To begin a new round, a new hand of 8 cards is dealt to each player from the remaining deck and a new jumper card to the middle of the table. Alternate passing direction with each round.

If the draw deck runs out of cards while dealing, the entire deck is reshuffled along with any discarded cards.

Scoring

Each letter has a point value on the top left of the card. Simply add up the value of each letter to determine the value of the word.

• Flush: Double the word value when all letters are the same suit.
• Straight: Double the word value when the word is 5 letters or longer.
• Both: Triple the word value for Straight Flushes!

Game End

When a player plays a single word worth 50 or more points, that player immediately wins the game, regardless of any other scoring.

Otherwise, the game ends after four rounds, and the player with highest total across all four rounds is the winner! If there is a tie, the player with the longest word in the final round wins.

Wordlist

The list of allowed words for Spellcrafter on BGA is from the Wordnik Wordlist open source project (full wordlist). This list is in English and largely excludes proper nouns.

Notes

Usability Tip: If the Spellcrafter game UI appears small and you're playing in a desktop browser, increasing browser Zoom (often with Ctrl++) to a level around 150% may help. Automatic scaling should be addressed in a future update and render this workaround uncessary.