Yep, I suspect the "win by 2 letters" thing is a play-tested thing. Simpler would just be "the attacker needs one more letter". But I suspect +2 results in a more fun game, at the cost of being slightly harder to learn the game and reason out the results of each battle.
Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk, and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.
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Yep, I suspect the "win by 2 letters" thing is a play-tested thing. Simpler would just be "the attacker needs one more letter". But I suspect +2 results in a more fun game, at the cost of being slightly harder to learn the game and reason out the results of each battle.
Aside: For instance, +1 is the defender's advantage in Risk, and I always loved the mechanics added by the Lord of the Rings version (and maybe other versions) where you could modify that advantage to anything from +0 (with a "leader" in the attacking army), to +3 (with a leader in a defending army on a tile with a "stronghold"). This is a bit different because it isn't dice rolls, but a similar idea.