There have been a great many card game spin-offs of popular board games recently, including a couple inspired by Monopoly and this one spawned from Scrabble.

What initially caught my eye about this one was that it is virtually identical to a game that I prototyped out and was play-testing when I saw this one on the shelf. It's always disappointing and a little frustrating to see someone else making good on an idea you came up with on your own, but it's also a bit of a confirmation for a small-time game designer looking to break in: I'm obviously coming up with good ideas . . . now I have to get the word out and beat the big boys to the punch.

At any rate, I tried Scrabble Slam out with the kids and found that it doesn't work well with players of vastly different vocabulary levels and reflexes.

I tried it with some of my grown up game-loving friends and we had a blast, as I'm sure it would be with kids of the same ages and grade levels.

Basically, there is a deck of Scrabble-tile-looking cards with letters on each side. The game begins with a 4-letter word being spelled out on the table in front of the players. The rest of the deck is dealt evenly between the players. Then it's a mad rush to change a single letter of the word in play to make a new word, calling out the word you are making while laying a letter card on top of one of the four letters of the existing word.

So DUCK becomes DUCE which becomes DUDE which becomes RUDE, etc. etc.

The action gets fast and furious as the competitors start trying to out-speed and -spell each other, which makes for fast fun--and, for me, a tension tightness in my chest as me and the woman who kept beating me kept getting down to our last cards and trying to out-Slam each other.

Keep the competition friendly and light, though, and this is a great party game, especially for word nerds and those that love them.