Tic Tac D’oh!
Objective: To complete a three-card word vertically, horizontally, or diagonally while preventing your opponent from doing the same.
For two players.
Shuffle the cards (including the two wild cards).
Draw out a tic-tac-toe grid on a piece of paper (or use an imaginary grid).
Deal ten cards to each player.
The player who didn’t deal puts down a card somewhere in the tac-tac-toe grid, with the goal of creating a word from three cards in one of the ranks or files or as a diagonal.
The dealer puts down a card somewhere in the grid to either block the creation of the first player’s word or to create their own three-card word.
The first player to complete a word out of three cards in a rank or file or as a diagonal wins. It doesn’t matter who put down the first two cards that contribute to the word.
If no player manages to create a three-card word, deal ten cards to each player and begin again.
Possible variation: For an extra challenge, have one player draw five consonant cards and the other player draw five vowel cards and restrict that round’s play only to those cards.
Note: 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.