Words With Friends iPhone-iPad (90%) ✰✰✰✰✰
Zynga's Words With Friends allows IPhone & Android users to play together
The growing reach of the internet has allowed video games that were fun to play at home, perhaps with a couple of friends on a multi-player console, to be played by any number of people anywhere in the world, with great graphics, theater-quality sound, and epic story-telling. Despite this trend (or perhaps because of it), one of the most popular apps for iPhone (and now Android) is Words With Friends – basically Scrabble on your phone. The appeal of the game is its relative simplicity – most people who can read English already know how to play scrabble – and the fact that you are playing head-to-head against another person.
The game-play itself is fairly straight-forward: move letter tiles onto spaces on a board in such a way that they are
1) all in line
2) touching an existing word on at least one edge of one tile
3) forming a non-proper word anywhere tiles are touching.
Your points, based on a number displayed on each tile, are a sum of all the points on all the tiles contained in any new words that were created by the placement of your tiles and any modifiers. The board is set up pretty much like Scrabble. You have to start in the very middle, and there are spaces on the board that multiply the point value of either a single letter tile or an entire word. The trick to the game (aside from knowing a lot of words and how to spell them) is to take as much advantage of these multiplier spaces as possible, and to prevent your opponent from doing likewise. Everybody knows how to play Scrabble, but it’s not like you see a lot of people whipping it out on the subway or when they’re supposed to be paying attention in business meetings.
The beauty of the game lies in the way it connects opponents. You can play anyone else on the network (one of the results of Zynga acquiring the game from Newtoy is that now Android users can now play with iPhone users and vice-versa) if you know their user name or can search by email address. Scrabble-type games existed before this, but WWF cuts through the submenus and options clutter to push you and your opponent’s moves quickly. You can have multiple games going at once with one or several opponents, committing all your tiles for your turn and getting the phone back in your pocket with a minimum of effort. All plays are checked against the on-board library, so there’s none of the social engineering that makes Scrabble fun for budding con-artists, and you can keep shuffling tiles around and submitting them until the library finally accepts one and sends it.
Personally, my only complaints about the game are the fact that no player stats are available and your game history is limited, and that there is no penalty for bombarding the library until you blindly come up with a word like “glime”. There is no solitaire version, although you can set it to pass-and-play, in which you take turns with an opponent using the same phone (great for fast play, and to make sure your opponent isn’t looking things up). There are tons of cheat sites and apps available for people to suddenly seem brilliant at Scrabble, but there is no way to prevent that other than choosing better friends.
The game comes in free version supported by ads, and an ad-free pay version ($3.99). The ads come after your turn, and the game is certainly enjoyable even with the inconvenience of advertising, but I do prefer the uncluttered pay version.
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