Glyph

Glyph is a roguelike word game. You spell words on a small board to beat a score target, then spend your winnings on things that make the next word score considerably more than it should.

In Scrabble, BANANAS is worth 9 points. In Glyph, it's worth 2.8 million.

Place tiles. Make a word. Beat the target. Very civilised. Every tile adds points, every bonus cell adds multiplier, and the round ends when you've spelled your way past the number or run out of words.

There are 165 of them, and each one quietly rewrites the rules of scoring. Some reward vowels. Some reward misspelling-adjacent behaviour. Several of them should not have been allowed. Same word, slightly different outcome.

Between rounds, the shop sells glyphs, 20 tile upgrades and 20 board cells. Gild your tiles, double your word cells, upgrade the letter you play every single time. Then do it again.

Every third round, a boss changes the rules: zeroing your best tile, disabling your glyphs, eating your letters. Beat them with a two-letter word. It's more satisfying than it should be.

Retrigger chains, scaling multipliers and glyphs that feed other glyphs. Late runs stop resembling arithmetic and start resembling an incident.

Six worlds per run. Six paths and six bags that each twist the rules. And a global leaderboard, currently topped by someone who scored 7 million with the word JOE.

• 165 glyphs that bend, break and occasionally ignore the rules of scoring

• 20 tile upgrades and 20 bonus cells to build around

• 18 bosses that cheat, and you can't do anything about it

• 6 paths and 6 bags for very different runs

• A global leaderboard for comparing poor decisions with strangers