I finally got to play Handsome yesterday. What a lovely little word game that is! The design is also an ingenious response to the 18 card constraint, which causes it to be quite unlike any other word game I own. It looks to me as if it supports 2-6 players equally well, and of course it’s ultra-portable. I thoroughly recommend having a look at this if you enjoy word games.
Here are the cards:
Together they comprise all of the consonants of the English alphabet, and none of the vowels.
Each round players will be working with a private hand of 2 cards, plus a public pool of 5, and trying to come up with a word using any/all of those 7 cards combined with as many arbitrary vowels as they require. Each card may be used once only (so no repeated consonants are possible, but repeat vowels may be used); and for the cards with two letters you may use either one of the letters, but not both.
The cards come in three suits (necklaces, bow ties, and bolos) and each round there is one point allocated for each of the three suits, going to the player(s) whose word used the most cards of that suit. A given word may score in multiple suits, and the “dual suit” cards count for both of those suits. The S/Y card has no suit. Finally, the longest word of the round scores a bonus point, regardless of suits. The winner is the first player to 9 points.
My sole caveat is that I think it’s a challenging word game for some of us – my brain struggled with linking up the consonants I could physically see in front of me with vowels which had to be conjured up mentally. Regardless of this, I greatly enjoyed it; but the BGG comments section tells me that I am far from alone in finding the visualisation difficult, and that some people have ditched the game on that basis, so YMMV.
We only had time for one full game, and I came last, but I got the best word of the game with “exfoliation” (which was dramatically better than all of my other words!)
My first impressions are that this is a little gem, and absolutely a keeper for me.
Edit: Solo variant on BGG: HandSolo - Unofficial Single-Player (Solo) Variant | Handsome