I come from a family of word-game lovers.My mom will forgo an afternoon at the beach to play a game of Scrabble. If I won’t comply, she’ll settle for a few rounds of Big Boggle. My aunt is so good at Bananagrams that she has to start with a disadvantage, or you never have a chance. And don’t try to propose to any frustrated family member of mine, crouched over the computer at midnight, to just go to bed instead of obsessing over being crowned a Spelling Bee “genius.”As a writer, I’m on board with word games in principle, but in practice, there’s a teensy-weensy problem: I’m a horrible speller. I try to console myself with the quote, “I don’t give a damn for a man who can spell a word only one way” (often attributed to Mark Twain), but, unfortunately, creative spelling isn’t a real point generator.Turns out, I’m less interested in the letters inside of words than the connotations that sprawl beyond them. I like the way words diverge and converge with each other in a seemingly endless web, the way you can look at each one like an object with distinctly different sides.Lucky for me, the word-game genre is not limited to search-and-find and spelling skills. The world learned this when The New York Times released its wildly popular word-affiliation game, Connections, and I learned it nearly a decade ago when Codenames became a family board-game staple.Top pickCodenamesThis thrilling wordplay game with a spy theme scales for small and large groups.$20 from Amazon$20 from Walmart