Phlounder

Phlounder is a word game but one which requires manual dexterity. At the start of the round special dice are rolled to determine what type of word needs to be spelled (noun or verb) and how many letters the word must contain. All players then start grabbing letter tiles and attempting to complete a word. The first player who does so rings the bell in the center of the playfield. The other players then try to make any word from the letters they already have by adding or removing letters from the end of their row of tiles but they cannot rearrange the letters they already have placed. Players gain points for completing words and lose points for unused letters in their hand. The game runs for 11 rounds and at the end of that time the player with the highest total is the winner.

What adds a level of difficulty to the game is that the letter tiles are not simply sitting out in a pile but are arranged in six tracks on the playing board. New tiles can only be removed from one end of the track and discarded tiles must be placed on the opposite end of the track. This means the players must be constantly sliding tiles along the tracks. Since any player can take tiles from or place tiles on any track there is a good deal of activity around the board.

This game is unusual in the 3M lineup in that play can actually get quite physical. Players are doing a lot of grabbing in a fairly restricted area and it can become quite frantic and confusing. I suspect that emotions can probably run fairly high as well and I can see the game becoming unfortunately unfriendly as well. An interesting game concept but not one I think I will be playing too often.

And continuing with my analysis of box art; once again we have a family who is enjoying this game way too much.

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