Night Bawl

Objective: To discover the longest word in a dealt hand.

For group play

  1. Shuffle the deck (including the wild cards)

  2. The dealer deals out nine cards face down to each player, beginning with the player to the left of the dealr. The players should assemble their cards in a line but must not look at their card.

  3. Play begins with the player to the left of the dealer turning over their cards one by one until a word can be formed based on the revealed cards. The player can rearrange the revealed cards to assemble a word. However, if the player turns over all nine cards and is unable to discover a word, that player is out of the game.

  4. Once the first player finds a word (or is out of the game), the second player begins turning over their cards one by one until they are able to create a word that uses more cards than the one created by the first player. If they are not able to do so after all nine cards have been turned over, they are out of the game.

  5. Play continues in this fashion until there is one player left. That player, the one with the longest discovered word, is the winner.

Possible variations:

Players will inevitably miss words that can be formed by the cards in their hand and will thus fold even if they have a winning hand. In such cases, at the end of the game, if a player is able to identify a word in another player’s folded hand that would otherwise be a winning word, they can declare that word as their own and steal a win. Thus, all players must continue to keep all cards that have been revealed face up throughout the game.

Base the play not on the number of cards used to form a word but on the number of letters in the actual word being formed.

Notes:

This game can be played as a poker game and include betting, with players betting after each player’s turn.

As words can be pronounced differently depending on accent and dialect, there can be more than one way to transcribe a word phonetically. Thus, players should agree in advance on how to resolve questions about acceptable respellings. For example, they might chose to consult Dictionary.com or another dictionary of their choice for standard phonetic transcriptions of words.

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