The Great Word Game is one of the earliest games from Prickly-Pear Software. It is meant to a group / party game, with some similarities to Scrabble or Probe, but with some differences to make it more challenging (and devious). It includes full instructions in the game itself (quite handy in writing this summary up, I must say) and is completely text screen and keyboard driven. Each player will have to have the Coco to his/herself when originally picking a word for the other players to guess, which should be an English word without hyphens and no proper names (this is not enforced by the program). One difference with similar word games of the time (and this is where the deviousness comes in) is that the player can "pad" their word with up to 5 asterisk (*) characters either/both before and after the actual word, so that it appears to have more letters to guess than are actually present. The person guessing has to put those into their guess as well. The actual game play has players taking turns until they get a guess wrong (which can be either guessing a letter within the answer, or the entire word). This is where the second change from most similar games comes in - when you guess a letter, and it is present in the word, it only reveals 1 at a time per guess. So if a letter occurs more than once, you have to guess it more than once. It should be noted that you can guess the asterisk characters.
Once one of the player's has guessed another player's word, the remaining players have 2 turns each to try and guess their word. If they do not accomplish this, the original winner is awarded another 100 points and wins the game.
Title: The Great Word Game
Author: ???
Publisher: Prickly-Pear Software
Released: April 1982
Requires: Color Computer 1,2,3, 16K RAM.