Wordox is a
crossword game and a
computer game. Wordox is from the
Hoyle Games CD and is playable without the CD on
www.won.net.
Wordox is the game of trying to avoid having your letters stolen. Players share a common rack that all players can view at all times, and play words Scrabble-style. Each letter in each word you play changes to your color, including letters previously played by other players.
Your score is mostly made of the number of letters of your color on the board, except that the board is cleared (and those parts of the scores frozen) when somebody plays on one of the red spaces at the edge of the board (roughly in the locations of the Triple Word Scores in Scrabble).
Thus, the obvious strategy involves playing hooks (in Scrabble jargon) -- words played perpendicular to and just before or after another word, so that one letter is added to the other word, as in HOSE -> THOSE or VINY -> VINYL -- and parallel plays -- plays made parallel to and adjacent to an existing word, forming short words at each position. Other strategies, just as important, include trying to play words that cannot be extended easily, trying to avoid leaving good letters on the rack for opponent(s), and careful play around the board-clearing squares much as you would be careful around triple word scores, the difference in the last being that it's not always to your advantage to play on the square, so sometimes you'd prefer to block it instead.