The pool is shared. Any word already on the table is fair game to extend and steal.
The hook
Anagram games are usually a solitary race to spot words in a pile of letters. Word Heist adds the mechanic that turns it into a party game: nothing you build is safe. Every word sitting on the table — including your own — is a target for anyone who can rearrange it plus a few pool letters into something longer. Kabir spent three turns proud of RAT. Riya spent one turn turning it into PIRATE. The pool doesn't care who built what; it only cares who holds the longest word when the tiles run out.
A sample round
Hand the phone to Riya — flip or forge
1 · Riya's turn: the pool sits open on the table
2 · Riya spots the steal before Kabir does
3 · The steal lands; Kabir loses everything he built
How a round plays
- A shared pool of loose letter tiles sits face-up in the middle of the table.
- On your turn, either flip a new tile into the pool or forge a word using only pool letters.
- Or steal: extend any player's existing word with pool letters, rearranged into a new longer real word (RAT + P, I, E → PIRATE) — you take the word and it's yours to defend.
- Stolen words change owner and can be stolen right back later by someone else.
- When the pool runs dry, each player's longest surviving word scores; ties break on total words held.
Why it's sticky
The paranoia is the whole game: the moment you set a word down, it stops being safe, and watching someone slower-witted realize their word just got stolen out from under them is the payoff loop. The dictionary check means there's never an argument about whether PIRATE is a real extension of RAT — the app adjudicates, so the drama stays about the steal, not the rules lawyering. It rewards both vocabulary and vigilance: Mom's six-letter SNORE is safe not because it's clever, but because nobody's paying attention to it.
Modes
- Classic — full shared pool, steals allowed all game, longest word wins.
- Blitz Heist — smaller starting pool, faster games, higher steal frequency.
- Teams — pairs share a hand and defend words together against rival teams.
Build notes
Size: M. The shared shell covers the pass-the-phone handoff, scorebar, and how-to-play screen, but this one earns its Build M rating in game-specific logic: a word-list validator that checks every forge and steal against a real dictionary, and steal-detection that has to prove a claimed word is a valid anagram of an existing word plus specific pool tiles (not just "contains the same letters somewhere"). The tile-pool state machine also has to track ownership transitions cleanly so a stolen word's history stays consistent. That logic sits in a plain JS module separate from rendering, so a future turn-by-turn async mode (players take turns via a shared link instead of a shared phone) can reuse the same validator and steal-checker untouched.