Let's talk a little bit about books in Watchword!

Books are the bread and butter of crazy synergies! They can COMPLETELY break the rules of the game and let you create new strategies. Certain books work well with others, some combo well with specific pieces, and some have high risk for high reward.

In other roguelike games these might be considered your "relics". Typically in Watchword you can have 6 books at a time (although there are some ways to increase that number). Choose very wisely, but if you change your mind you can always sell your books at the shop for a reduced rate.

Books come in multiple rarities ranging from Common to Mythic. Mythic books have a 1% chance to appear in the buy-brary (shop) so be ready to grab one if you see one!


Each book has a unique power. Here is a little preview of some of my favorites :)


- Slot Machine Manual Mk2 : Played G A M B L E pieces have a 1 in 3 Chance each to gain 2 Gold, score 3 amp, or do nothing
- The Finalist: The Last letter of each word does not count toward the dictionary check.
- Banana Brad: Repeated letters in a word trigger 1 additional time for each letter of the same kind.

Book FAQs:

Q: How many books will be in the final game?
A: At least 100, I'm shooting for closer to 150 but likely will add more in updates as well.

Q: How many books will be available in the free demo?
A: Somewhere around 25-30

Q: Why don't you have more books that do something with "Words that mean X" or "Words about X"
A: This is something I struggled with a lot in development. It's extremely difficult to do anything with words "meaning" something when developing a game. Take a look at the game Scribblenauts which is probably the best example I know of. They had to draw each and every item by hand. As for the functionality of each word, they have a clever "tags" system so similar items behave like others. For example anything with the "human" tag is susceptible to disease, scared of lions, etc.

Our English dictionary in the game is >100,000 words and to be honest, I'm just one dude! I don't have the smarts or the time to make sure all words have meaning and that includes things like semantically related words.

This is becoming a long winded answer, but an early prototype version of watchword used a language processing technique called "Word Embeddings" to try to have the ability to relate words together. At the end of the day, it was not a successful test. Different people had different ideas about what would should be considered related, so it felt like it took the strategy out of the game and replaced it with, "Hey let's guess if this computer things cat and dog are semantically related"

Q: Do you read a lot? What are you reading?
A: Not as much as I'd like to, but yes I do enjoy a good book series. Right now I'm reading The Way of Kings series by Brandon Sanderson

[ 2025-04-05 15:15:50 CET ] [Original Post]