Illiterati Review

Up to 5 players must work together as members of the League of Librarians to stop the dastardly Illiterati, an evil organisation trying to destroy the world of literature.  Featuring cooperative and PvP modes, this is a real time word building game in which players must assemble letters to create words. Fighting against a timer, they must also try to bind their spell books, each with a certain objective and criteria to meet.

Thematic, Cooperative Scrabble

This small boxed game sets up quickly and is simple to teach, regardless of the experience levels of the players. The game begins with each player receiving a spell book, which are either red or blue. Each of these contains the objectives needed to win the game. In addition to a letter count, players will have goals such as “something that flies” or “2 syllables” as-well as a type of symbol required. 4 types are displayed on each letter tile, which makes spelling out the words you need harder.

Each player takes a bunch of letter tiles, adjusts the game based on the difficulty and prepares the Illiterati deck. Each round begins with more letters being added to the table for players to interact with, then when everyone is ready, the 3 minute sand timer is flipped. Each player has to bind their spell book, once they do so they gain one of the other colour. When everyone has completed 2 books, one more spell book is drawn with a final chapter on it.  Now everyone must work together and complete this last objective, if they do, they win!

However this isn’t as easy as it sounds. At the end of the round, any unused letters get returned to the centre of the table, or the library as the game calls it. If these letters exceed the library limit, determined by player count and difficulty, then a random letter is “burned” and the others discarded.  These burnt letters go onto the burn tracker board, if this fills up, the players lose.

Not only that but the evil Illiterati deck is drawn at the end of each round, revealing a dangerous villain who can cause chaos for everyone.  These cards can burn saved words, change books, move letters around and generally make the game more difficult. To make matters worse if a card is drawn and that character’s card was already out on the table, it causes a chain reaction, triggering all the effects of that villain’s previously drawn effects.

Production & Presentation

Illiterati is packed full of great quality content. 2 velvet bags hold the thick letter tiles. The sand timer, cards and tiles all fit nicely into the box insert too.

There is a lot of passion put into making this game unique and visually appealing. From the colourful cast of Illiterati cards, to wide variety of fun and well designed spell book cards. Each one having thought provoking and often entertaining objectives.  There is even fun and tongue—in-cheek flavour text on each spell book too! Each tile feels nice to hold, rattling them around in their luxury bags while the table fills with everyone’s carefully constructed words, reminds you of how well produced this game is especially for the price.

The cards are thick and durable and it has plenty of nice little design choices. My favourite being the box itself is meant to be a book. Complete with a paper side and a bookmark like draw string to pull the game open.