Cursed Words Turns Scrabble Into a Roguelike and Steam Players Are Loving It

You start by spelling BUY. Then GAME. Normal words, normal tiles. Twenty minutes later, you are placing chess pieces next to fractions on a board that no longer resembles anything Hasbro would approve of. That is Cursed Words: The Word Game That Isn’t, and it launched on Steam three days ago to a 93% positive rating.

Developed by UK studio Buried Things and published by Forklift Interactive, Cursed Words is a roguelike that starts as Boggle and ends as something entirely unrecognizable. Players form words on a letter grid to hit score targets, earn currency between rounds, and spend it on upgrades that progressively warp the rules. Letters become numbers. Numbers become fractions. Fractions become poker hands. The escalation is the entire point.

What the Game Offers

Each run moves through five stages with two encounters and one boss per stage. There are 11 playable characters, each with a fundamentally different approach to building combos. Over 300 stickers and stamps serve as the upgrade system, letting you modify tiles, multiply scores, and stack synergies that snowball through later stages. Twenty bosses sabotage your board in creative ways, though skilled players can manipulate boss mechanics to multiply their own scores.

The synergy system will feel familiar if you have played Balatro. Both games share that DNA of starting simple and ending absurd, layering modifiers until the original game is barely recognizable. The difference is the medium. Where Balatro uses poker hands, Cursed Words uses vocabulary. Or at least, it pretends to.

The “Beyond Words” Part

Cursed Words does not stay a word game for long. Void tiles introduce negative values that can be converted into high scoring shiny tiles. Number tiles act as position-locked wildcards. Later in a run, the game introduces chess notation, fractions, and abstract symbols that replace letters entirely. The 26 challenge modes push this further by rewriting core rules.

It is mouse-only, single player, and reportedly runs well on Steam Deck. A full run takes around 30 to 45 minutes, with Challenge Crowns adding harder difficulty tiers for players who want to push their score ceiling.

Who Made This

Buried Things is a small UK studio co-founded by Niru Fekri-Arnold. The publisher, Forklift Interactive, was started by Andrei Podoprigora (former Publishing Director at tinyBuild) and Tucker Dean (former Product Lead at Adult Swim Games). The studio describes its focus as “smart, systemic, endlessly replayable games,” which fits Cursed Words to the letter.

The Numbers

Three days after launch, Cursed Words holds a Very Positive rating on Steam with 93% of its 113 reviews being positive. No Metacritic critic score yet, which is expected for a small indie launch. It is priced at $14.99 with a 10% launch discount bringing it to $13.49. A free demo is still available for anyone who wants to try before buying. There are 175 achievements for completionists.

If you enjoy roguelikes that reward system mastery, Cursed Words is worth your attention. It does not need a massive vocabulary. It needs you to think in synergies.