Each turn you spell a word from the letters in your hand, and its grammar is its combat effect. Nouns raise a shield, verbs deal damage, adjectives charge up your next verb (sometimes with an element), and prefixes or suffixes multiply the result. Read each enemy's weaknesses and resistances, chain an adjective into a verb for a big elemental strike, and battle your way down a 14-floor gauntlet.

• Verbs attack, nouns defend, adjectives buff your next verb, and affixes like re-, super- or -est multiply the effect.
• Enemies show badges for weaknesses, resistances, armor, enrage and regen, fight each one accordingly.
• Clear a floor to choose a relic; relics stack for the rest of the run.
• Reach and clear all 14 floors to win the run; your score is the depth you reach.

• Desktop: click letter tiles or type on the keyboard to spell a word; press Enter to cast, Esc to clear, and Backspace to undo a letter.
• Phone & tablet: tap the letter tiles to build a word and tap to cast, fully playable by touch.

• Lead with an adjective, then a verb, so the buff and its element land on your strike.
• Match an enemy's elemental weakness for bonus damage, and switch elements when it resists one.
• Against armored foes, lean on elemental attacks, they slip past armor that blunts plain verbs.
• Save your biggest combo turns for enemies that enrage or regenerate, and burst them down fast.

Spelling words from a hand of letters for score is Scrabble's, and the run structure — floors, a growing build, a run that ends — is the roguelike's.

The original idea is what decides a word's effect: its part of speech. Nouns shield, verbs damage, adjectives charge the next verb, and affixes multiply.

That turns grammar into a combat system rather than a scoring table. Scrabble cares only about letters and squares; here a short verb can beat a long noun, so the question stops being which word is worth most and becomes which word does the right thing this turn.

Grammar Gladiator is an original word-game roguelike built in-house, turning vocabulary and parts of speech into a deck-building-style combat run. It's free to play in your browser.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.