Lavellum 2008

Lavellum is a deep word game for two players, which can be played with paper-and-pencil and in which chance plays no role. A brief summary of the game:

2 players take turns forming words on an initially empty grid. On your turn, first you think of a set of letters, and then you repeatedly add this same set of letters to the board to form words, Scrabble-style, until you run out of ways to add them (There can never be duplicates of the same word on the board.) Your score for the turn is the number letters in your set times the number of words you formed with them. On your next turn you think of another set of letters and do it all over again. The game ends when both players pass and the player with the most points wins. There’s some other stuff, like challenge rules for made up words, a limit on the number of times you can use the letter S, and a pie-rule for the first turn of the game, but that’s the gist of it.