WINNER Southern California Book Festival Best How-To Book Word games can be beneficial to us in a number of ways. Perhaps their greatest benefit is that they promote social interactions and increase time spent involved with family and friends. For children especially, playing word games with others provides a simple, stress-free way of enhancing their emotional, intellectual, and social skills, and helps to build their self-esteem while they engage with people in a positive way. Word games are also an absorbing way to spend our solitary time, and while they are generally engaged in for their entertainment value, they serve an educational purpose as well–challenging us intellectually and providing new learning opportunities. There are scores, if not hundreds, of types of word games available. In this book, I have chosen to focus on several of those that are most popular or well known. My intention is to provide the readers with a basic introduction to broad spectrum of such games, not to serve as a definitive instruction manual, nor as a source of large numbers of puzzles on any specific theme.
