Letter
Jam

Letter Jam (2019) is a co-operative brain game where you use Hangman clues to find letters and complete a Wordle-style puzzle. You play by guessing letters to uncover your secret word. Both the word clues and secret word are unusually helpful because they're chosen by your team. It's a game you could overlook because it all sounds a bit confusing, but when you play it works surprisingly well.

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There are two stages. First is like Hangman, using your teammate's word clue to find your current letter. Then, when you think you know all five letters you try to guess your target word like Wordle. If everyone manages this, the team wins.

Although you can see one of each player's letters at a time you can't see your own. Each go you pick one player to spell out a word clue by placing number tokens next to the letters you see. It's a clever way of doing because everyone's version of the word clue has their unseen letter missing. If it’s a good clue they should be able to guess their letter, turn it face down and turn up the next one. The final act is to rearrange the face down letters (hopefully) into the target word assigned at the start of the game. If everyone manages this the team wins.

The result is a game that takes the letter guessing fun of Hangman and Wordle and turns them into a team game. It works because of the clever letter sequencing clues that let everyone guess their letters at once. It’s the sort of game that’s hard to describe but surprisingly streamlined to play.

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Our examiner, Rob Prior, first checked Letter Jam 19 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 10 months ago.