A Game That Blends Fortnite With Scrabble

“Babble Royale” shows the delicious creativity that comes from mixing genres

That’s me, playing “HE” in the bottom of the screen. I got killed a few minutes later

Mixing genres is a classic way to make something new.

If you take two very different film genres — sci-fi and the Western — and mix ’em together, voila: Star Wars. (And Firefly.) If you mix the heroic-epic poem with scandal-sheet 18th-century gossip, you get Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. Take hip-hop, shove it in a blender with traditional Broadway and nonfiction history, and out pops Hamilton.

I’ve been thinking about genre-blending because I’ve spent the last 24 hours obsessively playing Babble Royale, a brilliant new game that mashes up two genres that seem, at first, hilariously dissimilar:

• “battle royale” games like Fortnite: Kill or be killed! Last person standing! Collect your power-ups and slaughter without hesitation!
• Scrabble

It is unsettling how well this combination works.

If you want, you can skip my analysis and just try the game yourself — it’s free on Steam. But come back for my piercing exegesis afterwards, k?

The game’s rules are thus:

1. You begin play as a single Scrabble-esque letter tile, except you’re falling from…