Word Magnates

Two rival business magnates are competing to take control of a high-rise office tower.
Each owner operates a business on their side of the building.

Before leaving for the day, each of the owner’s employees pulls the shades on their windows to reveal random letters.

When the owners arrive back to work in the morning, they check to see what words have been made across the windows on their side.
The owner whose side of the tower has the best scoring words, wins that day.

After several days, the owner with the top score will control the building.

Word Magnates is a strategic word game for two players, aged 7+. It is a game of building a tower of two-sided magnetized letters without your opponent knowing what words they are making. It’s a game of secret word creation.

COMPONENTS:
- Lasercut tower with "windows" to view the letters.
- Built-in score board.
- 30 wooden black magnetic tiles.
- 30 wooden white magnetic tiles.

Each set of 30 magnetic tiles is coloured black on white or white on black and have point values (1-5).

SETUP:
1. Insert the tower into base.
2. Spread all the tiles face up.
3. Uncouple any tiles stuck together.
4. Group the tiles by colour into black and white sets.
5. Each player takes 10 black vowels (two each of A, E, I, O, U) and 10 white vowels.
6. Flip and shuffle the remaining tiles upside down within each group. Important: Do not mix the colours!
7. Each player takes half of the tiles from each group, placing them secretive in their own area.
8. Decide who will play which colour.
9. Grab paper and pencils for scoring.

GAME PLAY:
Either player starts by attaching one tile of each colour together and dropping both combined tiles into one of the three tower slots. Take turns attaching and dropping tiles. Make sure you always drop your coloured tile in front of you with the opposite tile as the other colour. Each player can only see their side of the tower. Try to drop letters such that their placement will help you make words and thwart your opponent.

FORMING WORDS:
As letters are dropped, words of three or more letters will eventually be formed in any of eight directions. These can be top to bottom, bottom to top, diagonal, across or backwards.

Keep dropping letters until the tower is full with 24 tiles (12 drops per player).

SCORING:
After completely filling the tower, scoring takes place. Players write down their words formed and tally the letter values. Players validate each other's words. Each player maintains their score on their built-in scoring track.

After scoring, turn the tower upside down to dump out the letters. Separate each set of tiles and detach the magnetic tiles.

BONUS POINTS:
Any player finding one word that their opponent missed will collect those points!

WINNING:
After several rounds, the first player to exceed 200 points (or a predetermined target) will be the winner. In case of a tie, the highest word made in the current round breaks the tie.

-description from designer