Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters Impressions - Graphics, Audio, and Crossword Puzzles with a Twist

You may not know this, but Pat Sajak, the host of Wheel of Fortune (one of the most popular game shows on American TV), is a great fan of word games, or so we're told. Incredibly, even after a long day of wheel spinning and selling vowels to people, the guy comes home and plays word games and crossword puzzles on his own time. The host's love of word games has led to the formation of his own company, Pat Sajak Games, which will release its first project, Pat Sajak's Lucky Letters, with Atari (and which plans to release its next game, Pat Sajak's Trivia Gems, sometime next year).

Lucky Letters will be a fictitious game show with audio hosting from Mr. Sajak himself. The game will offer surprisingly fast-paced, crossword-based gameplay with seven difficulty levels that correspond to the days of the week (Monday being the easiest, the Sunday paper being the most difficult). In each round you'll be tasked with solving a crossword puzzle; you'll be given a particular "intersection" of blanks to fill out, and you'll always be able to choose to try either the horizontally-oriented word or the vertically-oriented word.

Like in the later rounds of Wheel of Fortune, you'll be given a series of letters as hints you can guess at. Choosing a letter that belongs in the word fills it in, and you can make a full guess to "solve" the word at any time. However, some letters in the puzzle will be designated as "lucky letters," and if you're fortunate enough to end up with a word that contains one (indicated by an iconic image in the letter's space) and you pick the lucky letter that fits in that spot, you'll be greeted with a slot machinelike fanfare of flashing lights and trumpeting noises as that letter becomes revealed in every single word on the board. The game has three different rounds, and the stakes successively get higher with each round; you can even wager the imaginary money you've acquired so far as a virtual contestant.

Lucky Letters is scheduled for release later this year for the PC only, though Mr. Sajak's company is apparently also working on games for the PC, consoles, and mobile.