Textra is word game, that consist of a plastic container, 206 letter tiles and 4 letter trays - clearly inspired by Scrabble, but the main gimmick here is the plastic container with clever mechanism to separate vowels and consonants. In the container you have trail where you put your letter tiles to make words. And when the trail is full (something like 15 tiles), the first used letters drop in to two departments one for vowels and other for consonants.

When you start the game, the first player puts one vowel and one consonant in any order in to the trail and then every player gets six letter tiles to make words. You can choose the distribution of vowels and consonants at the start of the game and always when you refill your tile tray. At the players turn you try to make a word using as many already laid letters in a trail as the first letters of your new word. Rest of your word consists of letters you have in your tray. You just put the letters from your tray to the trail to make a new word. Then you multiply newly added letters with letters you used from the previous ones and that makes your points. You fill your hand and then it is the next players turn.

Example: "AUTO" becomes "autoMATIC" (4*5=20 pts.), then "ticK" (3*1), then "tickLE" (4*2) etc.

In a four player game you play to the end of the round, when someone gets total of 60 points. Winner is the player who got the most points. In three player game you play until 80 points and with two players until 100 points. When playing alone you just decide number of rounds and try to make as many points as as you can.

You can play this game as long as you like, because the used letters are dropping back to containers departments, which is the same place where you take the new letter tiles. There is 100 vowel tiles and 100 consonant tiles and six wild tiles in the game. There's quite a few letters missing, that are used in Finnish language. Letter distribution of the game is: vowels: (40*A, 10*E, 20*I 15*O, 15*U) and consonants: (5*H, 5*J, 15*K, 15*L, 5*M, 10*N, 5*P, 5*R, 10*S, 20*T, 5*V). You can play the game in any language, where you can make enough words with these letters. Because of "the clever" mechanism, the vowel tiles are bit smaller than the consonant tiles.

Games