This was really fun. I love word games, and I like the strategies involved here, like saving up a lot of letters in one category to set up a big cash-in when you start a word with one of those letters. If you were going to flesh it out into a larger game, I would suggest re-balancing some stuff, e.g. I had access to way more block and HP than necessary so it felt kind of impossible to lose. Also, when scrambling letters it is disorienting to have them spread out over the screen, so I'd group them close together and probably get rid of the commas. Finally, as always with your games, amazing art!

Thanks for playing, and double thanks for the feedback and ideas!

I also felt that the defensive options were somewhat over-tuned, but I figured that for a game-jam situation it's probably better to aim for "too completable" than "intractably difficult." In retrospect, I think the "physical attacks can be blocked, magic attacks cannot" (a design idea picked while developing at high speed) contributes to the underlying problem. It's not a totally bad system, but during design, I had the feeling that the player character was pretty fragile, especially if players had bad luck or misunderstood the value of their healing units. 

The counterplay it allows is just pretty narrow, I guess. It's probably not too bad when we don't have tons of mechanics to begin with: it could have a fun, delayed impact on decision making if you're trying to stay topped-off and it was an easy lever to turn up to make bad guys scary. In a bigger game I think it'd be more appropriate as a smaller, special corner of the design.

If we do go for more word-making fun I'd love to pick your brain for layout ideas. In my head I was imagining that we'd have little scrabble slates or boggle-esque trays of letters, but I can see what you're saying about the distance being non-ideal.