Champions of Word Wrestling is a word making and manipulation game with a theme of sumo wrestling. The art on the cards shows sumo wrestlers in various positions, and each player on their turn must change the current word into a new word using one or two actions, or they are out of the game, similar to a wrestler being pushed out of the ring.
The game's deck has 124 cards: 96 cards with one letter, 25 with two letters, one "any vowel" card and two wild cards. At the start of the game each player is dealt a hand of 7 cards and the top of the draw pile is placed on the table as the starter card. The first player who can make that letter into a word starts the game, and turns continue clockwise around the table.
On a turn, a player must use one or two moves (actions) to change the current word on the table into a new word, one not used in the game before. The allowed actions are:
ADD: Play a card at the beginning, end, or anywhere in the middle of the word, without changing the order of the cards.
REPLACE: Play a card on top of an existing card.
SHUFFLE: Rearrange the order of the cards.
THROW: Remove a stack of cards, and discard a card from the hand.
After making the new word, the player draws cards to replace those used for the Add and Replace actions. (The Throw action reduces a player's hand size for the rest of the game.) If a player cannot think of a way to make a new word using two moves, they are out of the game, and the last player left is the winner.
The designers of Champions of Word Wrestling include a speech language pathologist, and their intent was to make a game that was fun and engaging, as well as educational. Their page wordwrestling.com/research has pointers to many research papers that demonstrate the cognitive, social, and emotional benefits of word games.
