Someone mixed Scrabble with battle royale, and by god it works

(Image credit: Everybody House Games)

I've just spent a surprisingly tense several minutes playing Babble Royale, a free multiplayer word game that mixes Scrabble and PUBG and leaves you spelling for your life. Look below, it's me creating the word ANY and then connecting that Y to another player's W with an E.

Yes, I just totally fragged someone by spelling YEW. Get rEkt!

That's how Babble Royale works. Up to 16 players airdrop onto the board—literally, everyone starts as just an A tile and you sail down to the playing area, aiming for a good spot to begin, just like most other battle royales.

Once you're on the ground, your rack begins to fill with random letters, and you start making words, just like in Scrabble—build one word, and then build another word off that one. Your most recent word is, essentially, you, and if another player connects to you, like I did with YEW, you kill them.

Meanwhile, the board is shrinking due to the hot zone closing in, so as well as trying to kill other players, you're trying to build words in the right direction to avoid the hot zone, where you'll start taking constant damage. And all the while you're earning points that can be spent on new vowels or consonants, healing items, and bombs to blow up dead words in your way. The map also has word-score multipliers and other powerups scattered around.

It seems to be using something close to Scrabble's dictionary, too, so watch yourself. You're gonna see a lot of 2- and 3-letter words that don't really look like words, but are. At least it tells you the definition of the word that kills you, so you might just expand your vocabulary while playing. There are also premium items to buy, like emotes, tile skins, and even hats, if you feel like spending a bit of cash.

I like it. So will you. Go play it. Now. It's free and in Early Access, developed by Everybody House Games (maker of Universal Paperclips). Isn't the problem with Scrabble that no one ever wants to play with you? That's always been my problem. In Babble Royale, hopefully, you'll have no shortage of opponents.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.