Defenders of the Dictionary 2026

You may notice that your daily communications are filled with abbreviations, shorthand, and emojis, which are often auto-corrected by predictive technology. Thankfully, there is a task force dedicated to celebrating and preserving the richness of our language.

Your mission, as a defender of the dictionary, is to protect the diversity of language from the forces that seek to oversimplify it. Armed with your collective wisdom, you must use your words to navigate the city and stop the villains from diminishing the beauty of language. After all, knowledge is power, and it must be cherished.

In Defenders of the Dictionary, players will cooperate to navigate the city of Wordopolis via letter-and-grid-based wordplay. For each mission, you need to achieve a specific task and follow a particular direction with your words before running out of turns. Completing a mission helps you gain valuable intel about the villains and advances your campaign.

Defenders of the Dictionary takes the familiar gameplay of grid-based word games and flips it on its head. You will need to collaborate together within this system, navigate specific directions, and overcome the challenges and obstacles set by the villains.

The campaign is composed of many short games where each game represents a mission. Each mission may include some new and some previously introduced mechanisms. The campaign is designed with gamer group flexibility in mind so it's not necessary to play every mission with the same group of people. Complete all the missions to determine which villain was the mastermind, and face-off with them in the final showdown.

-description from designer