First Class Letters is a light party game of wordbuilding, taking bits of Scattergories, Boggle, and other similar games in a simple format where you’ll play seven one-minute rounds, trying to create the most valuable word you can in each round based on the rolls of four dice. Three of the dice will show letters you want to use, while the fourth, the red die, has a forbidden letter – and of course, they’re common ones, A-E-I-O-S-Y.
At the start of the game, you roll the three non-red dice and sort them alphabetically. Those become the required start letters for the words in rounds 2, 4, and 6; your seven words throughout the game must go in alphabetical order for you to score, and these start letters further constrain your options. In each round, you roll all four dice, placing the one forbidden red die on the mail carrier card. If you come up with a word that uses any of the letters on the regular dice, you get one point per appearance of each of those letters in your word. If you use all three letters, you double your score. If you use the red die’s letter by mistake, you score zero, and you will score zero if your word violates the alphabetical order of your seven answers. You’re only allowed to do ‘normal’ words – no proper nouns, no abbreviations, no foreign-language words, etc – although you can always tailor the game to your group/mood, including variants mentioned in the rules that include omitting the red die entirely.
And the resulting game is perfectly fine, although I also didn’t feel like it offered anything new among word games. I do Wordle and the Spelling Bee every day, I will play Boggle if it’s out, my daughter loves Scattergories (I think it’s mid, but I’ll play it), and I’m not sure what First Class letters brings to the proverbial table. “You have one minute to come up with a word that doesn’t use this one letter, uses as many of these three letters as much as possible, and that comes alphabetically after the last word on your scoresheet” is a very specific demand of a game, and each time I’ve played this one, I finished it thinking I wish there were more to it. I like anagrams and building words, and I do like the idea in here that you can up your score with words that reuse letters on the dice, but is that enough to supplant the few word games I already own? I ended up on the ‘no’ side, just barely, even though I do think this game will appeal to a small niche in the word-gaming audience.
Fun side note: I demoed this game at Gen Con at the GameHead booth, right next to Trinket Trove, and when the person giving the demo rolled the dice and explained the rules, I suggested the word “scuttlebutt.” The demo person told me that the rules say it has to be a real word. I, uh, protested the ruling.