Match

Match has a deck of 78 letter cards, 39 yellow and 39 red, and coins worth 240 points. At the start, 40 points of coins per player are put in a central pot, and 7 cards are dealt to each player. In each round, players make a bid of the value of letters to place on growing crossword. There are no turns; players make a bid when ready, but they may bid only once per round, and each bid must be higher than any preceding bid that round. The player with the winning bid adds their cards to the crossword, takes coins equal to the new word's score, and then everyone draws another card before the next round. If no one can make a bid on the current crossword, all its cards are discarded and players bid for the start of a new one. The winning bid's cards can be placed in only these ways: - Laying down the base word horizontally, at the game start or whenever the table is empty. The player who lays down a base word draws to build their hand up to 7 cards rather than just drawing 1 card. - Laying down a vertical crossing word, that uses one of the base word's letters. Crossing words may only cross the base word -- not other crossing words -- and may not be adjacent to each other. - Adding letters to one or both ends of the base word to make a new word. - Adding letters to one or both ends of a crossing word to make a new word. The value of a bid, and the score for a word, is the number of letters in it, doubled if they are all the same color. Some details: - The value of a bid only counts the cards being newly played, but the score of the new word counts all its letters, both letters added and those previously on the table. - If a bid's letters are all the same color, its value is doubled, but if the new word has both colors, its score is not doubled. The game ends when the pot runs out of coins, and the player with the highest total of points wins. The game's packaging is four 8.25" x 11.75" cardboard sheets fastened together at the edges, and two shrink-wrapped decks glued to the front. One of the internal sheets has the coins to be punched out, and the other can be folded into a 3" x 4.25" x 1" box to contain the cards and coins. The back sheet has the rules, and it cannot be folded to fit into the box.