Having the Last Word in Babble Royale

This is a bit of a departure from my other posts. But currently I’m the top ranked player in the world, so I feel like it’s a good idea to give the people who search “biggiemac42 babble royale” something to find.

The Game

Babble Royale is a free to play game released into early access less than a week ago. It has seen a large immediate surge in popularity, thanks to streamers such as forsen and xQc bringing tens of thousands of viewers. The game plays like any Battle Royale game (think Fortnite), in that you share a world with 15 other players, and have to fight to survive. But the actual movement, fighting, defending, all come from playing words in Scrabble. Last player standing gets “the last word.”

Mechanics

As an early access game, it provides less than complete tutorials. So this will be a quick rundown on the game mechanics.

At the beginning, you and 15 other players fall from the sky onto a 31 by 31 scrabble board. You can control the drop location with the arrow keys. There are randomized clusters of word/letter multipliers, and powerup tiles. More on those later.

Once you land, you are presented with the interface here. There are a lot of things already to talk about.

You

Your player character is the blue word. Every word you play must connect to your active word, and that word will become the blue word. Any tiles not part of someone’s active word will become gray.

Opponents

Every other player is an enemy, and they are colored not-blue. To defeat opponents, play words that connect to their active word. More later on what specifically counts as “connecting.”

Tiles

You have 5 tiles to begin, and they come from a personal Scrabble bag. They have the same distribution and point values as in Scrabble.

Next Letter

Above the scrabble tiles, there is a Next Letter countdown. At the start, the next tile comes every 12 seconds and only if you have empty space on your tile rack. If you don’t have empty space, the timer resets, so don’t miss it!

Health Bar

All attacks in the game are instant kills, so the health bar is only relevant to the “Hot Zone” which is discussed next.

Hot Zone

There is a message in the top left that the “hot zone” is shrinking soon. Similar to other Battle Royale games, the usable area shrinks over time, forcing players to interact with each other. After 2 minutes, 31×31 shrinks to 23×23. With 2 more minutes, it shrinks again to 15×15, and then 11×11. After reaching 11×11, it picks a random much smaller rectangle in the space, to prevent players knowing where they will be safe.

If any part of your active word is in the hot zone, you take damage over time. The damage does not depend on how much of the word is in the hot zone, a single tile is enough.

Levels and XP

The interface in the top right tells your level, the progress toward the next level, and how much money you have. To gain XP, you play words. Just like in Scrabble, you get points for the words you play, based on the letter values and any bonuses. There are 3x and 5x letter value multiplier squares on the board (in green). There are also 2x and 3x word value multiplier squares on the board (in blue). Playing longer words comes with bonuses for the length. Finally, playing multiple words at once (by connecting to existing words) gives you points independently for each word.

Money

Leveling up grants the player $3 to spend however they please. There are many purchases in the game. You can buy faster tile speed (It seems to be -1 second per purchase). You can buy extra tiles on the rack. Or you can buy extra inventory space (bottom left, more in the next section). All of these start at $1, and get more expensive $1 at a time for subsequent upgrades. These purchases last for the entire round.

Alternately, you can spend money on one-time things like buying a single power-up, or a consonant, or a vowel. These are good in a pinch. Although, note that buying consonants or vowels will use the next tile of that type from your scrabble bag. This means it affects the next random tiles in a statistical way.

Power-ups

Your inventory in the bottom left begins able to hold a single power-up. These come from playing a word onto a power-up tile on the board, or purchasing them directly from the shop. There are 4 types of powerups.

Bombs will destroy gray tiles around your active word, opening up space to play.

Rerolls will replace all of your tiles by new draws from your scrabble bag.

Medkits will recover 50 hit points, half of your max health.

S will generate an S tile without impacting your scrabble bag, and add it to your rack if there is space. This power-up can’t be purchased. Instead, you need to play onto an S tile on the board to get it. I think it is the most powerful of the four.

Overload

Finally, there is overload. It is possibly the most overpowered mechanic in the game, but also essential to get players out of tight spaces.

When you press the big red Overload button to the right of your tile rack, you get a free bomb effect. All gray tiles around your active word are destroyed. In addition, all tiles on your rack are destroyed, so you can’t take advantage of the space right away..

Rack Refill

However, it is very easy to make up for the disadvantage of overload, by using the game mechanic of Rack Refill. When you empty your board by playing your last tile, you get a free new set of tiles. This is way faster than waiting multiple seconds for the next tiles to come, and really lets scrabble pros move quick. After overloading, if you can play the single tile that spawns, you get a rack refill and can get back to work.

Strategy

Spawn Kills

In the image above, there is an opponent immediately adjacent to me at the start. This is an attempt at a spawn kill. But little do they know, I am way faster than them. In situations like these, the first player to make a word wins, because their active word connects to the opponent. And two letter words count.

So I spot the H on my rack, plop it down to make AH, and get a kill. Green becomes gray as the person is eliminated from the round. The kill feed in the top right shows that I am not the only one. Someone else “AE’d” their opponent.

But for the most part, spawn kills are not how you get the last word. They are nice, because kills increase your XP gain substantially. But as people get faster I expect this will become more of a 50/50, which is not good odds for someone trying to win against 15 opponents. Instead, the majority of the game is spent playing skillfully.

Playing Words Back to Back

In the image above, I want to get a kill on the player whose active word is SET, attached to VANT. VANT admits a “hook,” which is a way to extend the word by a single letter. S hooks are the most common. You can pluralize a lot of words by just adding an S, and VANT is one of those. This is all essential scrabble knowledge.

Hooks in Babble Royale have a tactical purpose. Here the opponent is on the T. If I can get on a word including the S of VANTS, then our words are adjacent. My word would kill them. But I need to reach it quickly.

So I build WORE, and then SEA + AW + VANTS, for the kill. All the letters for this kill are already on my rack, so I can drop them down extremely quickly and get a rack refill.

Avoiding Vulnerability

Long words are very powerful for reaching opponents, but having them as your active word makes you an easy target. So in the image above, I keep “ERS” as my active word. I know this word can be turned into several longer words easily, and I spot MINERS into MATE + DIE to kill the player on DI. I have to move fast though, because I’m technically vulnerable to something like ERGO + GO from the player on GOAL to my right.

Before I can finish the kill, the player has moved, from DI to RID. I put down the MIN but don’t submit it, looking for a new kill. MATE still kills here, now making ART + DIE in the process. But I choose a shorter option, MAE, a Scottish word in the accepted dictionary.

This allows me to put the T down in a defensive position, better defended from the person on GOAL.

Endgame

This is an example endgame. Two players remain, and the hot zone has crowded us both into a tiny rectangle already full of gray tiles. In this situation, having a bomb is crucial, so that you can open up space without using Overload and leaving yourself a sitting duck.

I’m about to get onto the word TROPE to avoid having the vulnerability of e.g. HER + HO + NO. From that vantage point it is much harder to attack me, and I can play from the T, drop a bomb, and make a silly word like ENE to win.

Bomb Radius

This is worth its own section because bomb into kill is how so many fights are won. It’s very important to know exactly what is going to happen after you use a bomb.

Every gray tile within 3 steps (no diagonals) of your active word is destroyed, but tiles owned by opponents are not.

Also I’m looking at these screengrabs and realizing I could have won with “RUINED” instead of cheesy words like TON + NE + ENE. Oh well, that’s hindsight.

How to Get Better

Strategy may be obvious to some and still impossible to plan around, because of boards full of crappy tiles, or slow input speed.

Faster Controls

The first recommendation I have is to use keyboard only controls.

Mouse is nice, but you can move very quickly with two hands on keyboard. Every action in the game can be done without a mouse. Ctrl + T for timer upgrade, ctrl + I for inventory upgrade, ctrl + R for overload. Hold ctrl in game to see the full set of hotkeys. Arrow keys to move the green indicator around to place words, Shift to change its direction. Type words to actually play them on the board. Alt + arrow keys to move around the map.

Better Vocabulary

As with every word game ever, the dictionary is a point of controversy. You hate getting killed by random words you’ve never heard of. Meanwhile the thing you just played should totally be a word, like OK or ZEN or WIFI. The dictionary is an official list provided by Wordnik. It takes some time to become familiar with what is and isn’t accepted.

Learning words by playing games is the best way to learn. You can study long lists of key words, like Q without U, or two letter words, or anagrams of AEILNRST with one other random letter thrown in. But I find it more fun to play a game to learn. I have a long history with the game Ruzzle, which is a boggle-like app. And of course, Babble Royale itself is a game. Learning the word list helps with recognizing options quickly.

Bad Tiles

Sometimes your board is just garbage. Can’t do much with UUUIV. In these situations, there is one tip to keep in mind. Overload right before new tile, memorize all the two letter words, get your rack refill and go forth. There’s a risk to it always, since if your new tile is a V or your active word is unaccommodating, it prolongs your suffering.

A lot of times though, bad tiles come from prior decisions. In Scrabble your “leave” is important. If you play your best tiles several turns in a row, your worst tiles stay on the rack. Making sure to play those Is and Us and Vs when you can, will optimize the board to hold your Es and As and Ts when you need them.

Closing Remarks

I threw this post together in an hour instead of the several days for everything else on my blog. I want to make sure that some guide exists somewhere from a top player, during the surge in popularity. Please note that I didn’t have any experience with this game before it released on December 15th, so I don’t have hidden playtester experience, I’m just a guy who figures things out really fast and loves word games. Currently that manifests as being the top player by MMR and win count! I’ve won over 50% of my 260 games. You can watch more of me on twitch or youtube.

I hope that the game continues to get love from its devs and its playerbase. Go forth and Babble!