Designed by Charles Chevallier with art by Sonja Muller, Cruxy is a roll & write-style word game, except that there are no dice to roll. Instead, players draw letters from a bag and those become the letters that they tick off whenever they write a word on the grid that crosses one that's already there. As with most roll & write games, there are icons to be crossed off when they're overwritten, and you also benefit from a special effect when, in a word you write, a letter is orthogonally adjacent to one of the Arctic or Antarctic creatures that appear in the grids.
The game comes with an eight-page rulebook, which casual players may find off-putting. However, Cruxy is easy to play and the rules are pretty much intuitive, with the exception of the various animal special effects, which players will need to look up while playing. Some of the special effects involve quite fiddly conditions, tho' these are ilustrated and exemplified in the rulebook - which is what accounts for its length. You can play in 'easy' mode tho' by just treating all animals as if they were Cruxy the Penguin (ie: just cross off any box).
Cruxy comes with a thick wad of double-sided grids in apparently ascending order of difficulty. There are two copies of each in order to accommodate team play, which is a speed variant of the game (the teams are racing to beat the other in writing words that let them cross out all the requisite letters and icons). You can also play in solo or cooperative mode, where the challenge is to cross off the requisite conditions using the fewest possible words. You could also challenge yourself in a solitaire mode by playing against the clock.
The thick wad of sheets supplied by Red Cat Games should give you plenty of play value out of your copy of Cruxy but if you feel you're running low, you might want to laminate a few so you can get multiple plays out of playing them with wipeable pens.
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