As someone who can get pretty obsessive about both reading and video games, I keep expecting gamebooks to grab me by the throat. It seems as though they should be perfect for that: part game, part book, all gripping entertainment.
Most of the time, however, I find them a bit thin. Not enough game to really sink into mechanically, not enough book to really reel me in. Sorcery! [$4.99] managed to keep me up well past my bedtime, though. Inkle offers the same expertise they displayed in bringing Frankenstein [$4.99] to life to the task of drawing the magic of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! out onto the screen. At least in part: thus far, only the first of the four books of Sorcery!, The Shamutanti Hills, is available.
The journey through those hills is still a gamebook trip, no doubt about it. There are stats, interactive combat scenes and plenty of big decisions to be made. It's just that nothing feels restrained; nothing feels all that formulaic. Sorcery! goes big where needed, and the app shines for it.
Heads up: Draw Something 2 [$2.99 / Free] is now a video game that you can play. There's two versions on the App Store. The one with a price, the "premium version" as Zynga calls it, gives you access to a free star and coin bonus and a free sparkle pen. It also doesn't have any ads. The other version is, naturally, free-to-play and can be upgraded, if you so choose. Seems like folks are digging the former.
There's a lot of people and analyst types wondering if this is going to be a big win for Zynga, which is a company that's been struggling of late. We've been passing around a NY Times article in the office this morning about this very thing. It's an interesting read that dives into how much dough the publisher has been tossing into the promotion of Draw Something 2 and how rough it's been over at the company in the recent past.
Our take is that it won't do as much damage on the charts as the first game. There was something in the air when the original managed to hit the heights that it did. The fall-off was incredible after it peaked. Folks seemed to pump their brakes on it just as hard as they hit the gas when it first came out.
Anyway, Draw Something 2 is a game you can play now. If you still like drawing pictures and making your friends guess what you drew, this seems like the game for you.
PopCap's Bookworm Heroes [Free] finally saw its international launch tonight after what's seriously been months of the game being soft launched in Canada. No joke, the thread for its Canadian release on our forums was actually originally posted on December 4th, 2012. I spent some time with last year's release of the game, and it really doesn't seem like there's a whole lot different from the actual proper international version aside from potentially minor balance changes or other things that are hard to notice.
The basic gist of the game is you either challenge your Facebook friends or random opponents to turn-based word battles. It's a lot like Writer Rumble in that your Scrabble-like individual word score gets converted into attack damage and the game is over once someone has reduced their opponents hit points to zero. You take turns until this happens, with various power-up style letter blocks potentially appearing that allow you to do way more damage.
As mentioned, my initial impressions of this version of the game mirror those of a few months ago in that I really don't like it when games lock me in to using Facebook for matchmaking. Personally, my Facebook is a safe place with only friends and family, not random weirdos I play video games with. Sure, I could have a second account, but that really seems less than ideal when services like Game Center exist. Additionally, the turn-based "combat" just feels really slow when you're used to the pace of what you'd typically think a Bookworm game to feel like- Particularly as you're left with nothing to do while you wait for all your opponents to make their move(s).
On top of that, it's also really free to play, with way too many UI elements dedicated to largely displaying just how many bonus coins (the in-game currency) you can get by connecting your Facebook and doing other social-spammy things. I suppose it's worth checking out just to see the dark path the creators of Bookworm [$1.99], Peggle [$0.99] and Plants vs. Zombies [$0.99] seem to be on with all this free to play junk, but I can't imagine Bookworm Heroes living a very long life on my device.
If an awkwardly earnest take on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme sounds like a good time to you, you'll probably dig Sarah Northway's Word Up Dog [$1.99]. Get it? "Dig"? Because you'll be digging in the dirt for dog bones and letters...? Just priming you for the endearing dorkiness of Word Up Dog, friends—it's a fun, original little word game, but you have to love it for the underdog it is.
With slang and character archetypes drawn from the blaxploitation era straight through the worst of the 90s, most of Word Up Dog's dialog is wince-worthy at best. Consider that the characters speaking it are cats, dogs and lizards living in an underground cavern filled with scattered letter tiles, though: nothing about this game's premise is well-grounded. Thematically it might need a little help, but mechanically I find I've been missing this little exploration word game in my life.
There are two classic games at work here. In one, you dig your way under the ground with limited resources and explore unknown caverns. In the other, you take letter tiles and organize them into the best-scoring words you can. Mixing the two is unorthodox, but it works.
This little doggie runs on bones, and bones are in limited supply—even deep underground. Each tile of dirt your pup digs away costs one bone—each dogbone he finds gives one back. That's a losing proposition, so it's a good thing you can use your vocabulary to earn yourself all the bones you need.
There are letter tiles scattered throughout the caves, waiting to be collected. Once you've claimed them you can shuffle them around into words and then sell those words for bones. Whether those words need to be real or not is up to you, since the so-called Hip-Hop dictionary includes slang like LOL while the Queen's English dictionary doesn't. Either way, you need to hit a certain quota of bones to reach the next level, and exploring is costly. It could be a struggle, but the game wants to help. It offers constant opportunities to come up with words of certain lengths will certain letters—turn them in on time and you'll earn big bonuses.
Your hungry pup isn't alone in this task—there's a whole cast hiding out in the caves to help him. There's a monkey that gives out free bones, a lizard that sells performance enhancing drugs out of his car, a cat that works demolitions and a few others. Each one will give you one of whatever he's selling—the rest cost precious bones.
They rarely prove to be all that necessary, because Word Up Dog isn't tuned for skilled wordsmiths or experienced explorers. This game needs a harder mode like nothing else. Each of its seven caves has its own thing, like impassible lava, slippery ice, teleporting sandworms and a few other challenges. These add some spice, but rarely much difficulty.
If you can spell your way through all seven levels, you can replay them for higher scores. If you can go far enough over the required bone quota, you can skip levels on later playthroughs—otherwise you have to work your way through from the start. It's an artificial limit on replayability, since there's not much to differentiate starting on one level from another.
This all sounds a bit bleak—an awkwardly written word game that never reaches its potential—but for all that, Word Up Dog is lovable. It's a bit dorky, and it needs a few tweaks to really offer much lasting value, but what's here is quite fun. It just needs a little more worth digging.
4 Pics 1 Word [Free] is a word guessing game. It presents you with four pictures and then tasks you with guessing what specific word fits with the theme of the photos presented. It's a simple game that really seems to be clicking with people if the App Store charts are any indication. It's also a weird game. Most of the time, the themes are much too simple and we're not 100 percent certain that this is the original 4 Pics 1 Word. There's a lot of them on the App Store, some by different developers.
Anyway, we played this game today because some really awesome dudes on Twitter said we should. As you can imagine, our playthrough had less to do with the actual mechanics of the game than it did with puzzling out why this thing is so popular.
If you'd like to see a few minutes, click on the video below. Also, we're totally open to TA Plays suggestions, so feel free to throw some below. Just, you know, don't suggest 4 Pics 1 Word Animal Edition or something because I'm pretty sure we couldn't handle it on the inside.
Are you the sort of person who knows all about the majestic alot? Have you considered sending your friends posters to help them with their little their/there/they're problem? Well then, we should probably hang out some time, since insufferability loves company. Also, you might want to take a look at The Grading Game [$0.99 / Free].
There's an argument to be made that this isn't really much of a game, that it's just badly disguised work. You take poorly written 'student papers' plucked straight out of Wikipedia, locate the errors that have been inserted into the text, and see how well you did at tracking them all down within a short timer. For the wrong person, this would be agony. If you're anything like me, though, you'll love it.
It's the timer that does it. I'm not the fastest editor out there, and The Grading Game isn't exactly generous. So many great games are about snap reflexes for skills you'll likely never use in real life, but this one hones skills that are actually pretty useful. Get good enough at it and you'll have no problem spotting a misspelling, a run-on sentence or a poorly-place punctuation mark at a glance.
There are two ways to play The Grading Game. One, Career mode, has you work your way through dozens of levels that focus on individual topics. Each time you complete a level you earn fake cash and unlock the next. The narrative has you grading to pay off a crippling pile of student loan debt, working for the abhorrent Dr. Snerpus. Fail his students and he's ecstatic. Let them through with a decent grade and you're fired.
Career mode's levels are split into three rounds, and your performance on each is paid out into one hefty total—supposing you've managed to get the students down to sufficiently low grades. Each round generally has its own style of play. Sometimes it's a matter of finding a certain number of errors before the timer runs out. Sometimes sections pop up one at a time, each with a single error to find. Occasionally a whole round will hinge on finding one sneaky little error, a nice break for your marking hand.
In Quick Play mode you're still working for Snerpus toward the same goal, but this time the play is more or less endless. Each time you finish a round you're presented with a new one, and you keep going until you fail to, er, fail a student.
The problems with this game are the ones you might expect if you're a seasoned stickler. There are rules that aren't always cut and dry, so the difference between success and failure can sometimes ride on iffy calls. Similarly, there are occasional errors in the text that the developers apparently neither introduced nor noticed. You get hit with a time penalty for incorrectly marking an error, so this can be a hassle.
I'm also going to nitpick briefly, as this is a game for nitpickers. The Grading Game is a nag. It nags me about following the developers on Twitter. It nags me about rating the game. It prompts me with all manner of prompts, and I'm really not interested. Learn to take no for an answer, mode of expression.
Most of the time, though, The Grading Game is pretty cool—assuming your idea of cool is finding other people's mistakes and punishing them. Allow me to propose that it's a better outlet for that sort of thing, than, say, your friends' Facebook conversations, or comments on blogs. Not only will The Grading Game make you a better, faster, more precise editor, it could make you more likeable to boot. How many games can claim that?
In 2012, puzzle games continued to shine in a big way on the App Store. Branching out from the typical word games and block sliders of days of yore, 2012 brought some seriously unique and innovative experiences- Both as spinoffs to existing App Store franchises and from developers that came completely out of left field with all new titles. Puzzle games are great because even as a "hardcore" gamer, you can often appreciate a puzzle game then share tips and recommendations to friends who are potentially far more casual with their game tastes.
Our favorites this year span new iterations on classic formulas like 10000000 to shockingly in-depth hidden secrets of the mysterious widgets found in The Room. If you're looking to have your brain twisted, and walk away feeling a little smarter (or a little dumber in the case of failure) check out some of our favorite puzzle games of 2012. Keep in mind, the "puzzle" section of the App Store is quite crowded, so this list is a little bigger than the rest:
The Room Pocket, Free / The Room for iPad, $1.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - As featured in our 2012 Game of the Year post: Few games succeed at providing the level of immersion of The Room. Play it on your iPad if you can, but otherwise, grab your headphones, turn down the lights, and dive in. As a player you're put to the task of unraveling the riddles of a curious mechanical box. Secrets are everywhere to discover, and each "layer" of the box reveals an increasingly detailed puzzle to solve. The only real down-side to The Room is that it ends shockingly abruptly, leaving you remarkably hungry for more. Fingers crossed for The Room 2 in 2013.
The Hacker, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Released months before The Room was this similarly atmospheric puzzle game. Inside The Hacker, as the title would suggest, you play as a hacker infiltrating various computer systems. The plot is laid out via emails, instant messages, and other communication mediums as you're constantly delving deeper into different puzzles that all vaguely play on computer security systems. While the actual puzzles themselves may feel a little basic at times, as a complete package, The Hacker truly shines.
Girls Like Robots, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - [TA Plays] - Adult Swim knocks it out of the park (once again) with this puzzler that puts you to the task of satisfying the needs of women by appropriately seating them near robots and away from nerds. The premise is silly, and sounds a little basic, but can be downright brain-twisting as you pour over which grid squares to place girl, robot, nerd, and pie slices to make everyone happy. (Nerds like pie, you see.) If logic puzzles are something you enjoy, Girls Like Robots is among the best we played this year.
Beat Sneak Bandit, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Part rhythm game, part stealth game, and part puzzler, filing Beat Sneak Bandit amongst our puzzle game grouping feels the most appropriate. In the game, you play as the beat sneak bandit, trying to sneak out of single-screen rooms by tapping on your screen in time with the beat. It's a remarkably clever gameplay mechanic, but comes with the distinct drawback of absolutely requiring sound of some kind to play the game, which may not always be ideal. I highly recommend it though, so bust out those headphones and go to town.
Dream of Pixels, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - There have been a lot of Tetris variations on the App Store (most of which are swiftly nuked by EA's legal team) but Dream of Pixels does things differently by quite literally turning the Tetris formula on its head. My favorite part of the game is the puzzle mode where you're only given a select few blocks to entirely clear the screen. Be sure to give this game a try if you like Tetris and looking for something new.
Triple Town, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Don't let the super cute graphics fool you, this game can be tough, almost like playing a single player version of Chess with bears who are total jerks and constantly thwarting your progress. The town building process is delightfully complicated, and once you have that moment of clarity where you finally understand the strategy of the game Triple Town evolves into a puzzler that you can't put down. On the up side, it's free to try, so you can see if it clicks with you before spending a cent.
10000000, $1.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - As featured in our 2012 Game of the Year post: On the surface, it's a simple row sliding-based match three, but once you play through the tutorial you begin to realize that it's more about managing the board state over forming any single specific match. For instance, you'll need sword and stave blocks in an immediate sense, as matching those is how you attack enemies. However, without managing removal of the stone and wood tiles, you quickly run out of available board space for swords and staves. Stone and wood are used for upgrading and repairing your castle, adding a sense of over-arching progression between individual match three dungeon crawling sessions.
Polymer, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Polymer took the tried and true mechanic of sliding columns and rows to create matches and turned it on its ear. Here, you're sliding to make polymers, essentially combining the proper pieces to create larger, continuous shapes across the game board. The trick is that once you have things lined up, sliding a row or column could potentially mess up your created shape, meaning careful forethought and planning many moves ahead are crucial to success.
Puzzlejuice, $1.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Hey, you, you like word games, yeah? But what about Tetris? Like that too? Well, Puzzlejuice is the delightfully frantic hybrid of the two and doing well not only requires a killer vocabulary but also flawless planning and spatial management as you deal with the letter tiles on the game board. If you liked last year's SpellTower, don't miss PuzzleJuice.
Letterpress – Word Game, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - This amazing turn-based multiplayer word game was actually the first title that was popular enough to bring down Game Center. Seriously, that happened. In the game, you form words to take over territory on a game board. As fun as it is, the game's major flaw is the lack of any kind of tutorial. Letterpress is nearly the perfect casual word game, but I feel like every time I recommend it I then have to spend a considerable amount of time explaining how to play it. Regardless, check it out. (Just don't ask me how to play it, I'm at capacity.)
Angry Birds Space, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - When asking "What's next?" for the Angry Birds series, I'm not sure anyone expected them to go to space. Regardless, this title further iterated on the classic Angry Birds formula, but in some really clever ways that ratcheted the difficulty up as you not only needed to aim your shots precisely, but also potentially deal with various types of gravity fields from different planetoids and obstacles.
Angry Birds Star Wars, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - [TA Plays] - I think the internet as a whole let out an audible groan when news broke that Rovio was teaming up with Star Wars, but Angry Birds Star Wars is actually quite good. The progression through the Star Wars story told in the Angry Birds universe is incredibly clever, and it's really neat getting new abilities for your existing birds as you... Err, further your Jedi training.
Bad Piggies, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - [TA Plays] - When Rovio mentioned their next game would be from the pigs' point of view, I think we all expected to sling pigs at birds. That made sense. Instead, they surprised us with this surprisingly elaborate contraption building game which not only puts players to the task of actually constructing the pigs' contraption, but piloting it to the goal. Definitely check this one out if you haven't already.
This weekend Microsoft released an iPhone version of a popular Windows Phone game through the App Store. Originally a pet project developed by a couple of Windows Live developers, Wordament [Free] is a word game that presents a real-time, two-minute word-finding challenge against on-line players. It's a quick race against the clock to swipe out any words you can find in the 4x4 letter grid presented.
Wordament is amusing enough, but it is most noatable for being the first game in the App Store that features, not Game Center, but Xbox Live Achievements.
When you sign in with your free Microsoft account, you can earn up to 50 Gamerscore from our 10 achievements and you’ll have access to all of your Xbox Friends and Wordament Frenemies. If you’ve played on Windows Phone or Window 8 and jump to the iOS version, all of your player stats and friends will follow your account automatically.
Microsoft released their official Xbox Live app, My Xbox Live, in the App Store one year ago, which becameXbox Smartglass [Free] last month.
Easily one of my favorite games this year is Atebits' Letterpress [Free], an asynchronous online word battling game. Now, I enjoy word games just fine but I often lose interest in them quickly, or get frustrated staring at a game board for ten minutes racking my brain to think up the longest, most elaborate word possible. Letterpress changed all that because it's not just about playing the words, but playing the board itself in a highly strategic battle of territory against your opponent. We get into all that in our full review of Letterpress, if you're curious.
Anyway, this week brought an exciting new update to the word game, most prominently adding a new replay feature. It's actually really brilliant. At any time, even if a game is still in progress, you can hit up the in-game menu and choose a new "Share Replay" option. From here you can share a link via email, text/iMessage, Facebook or Twitter, or just copy the link to your device's clipboard for pasting into Safari or wherever. The link takes you to a beautiful little HTML5 replay of your current or completed game. There's a slider that allows you to look through every move made thus far, or you can tap on the played words in a list below the replay to jump straight to when that word was played in the game.
It's an extremely clever way to relive some of your greatest triumphs and defeats, or to share with others any particular game you like. Here is a fairly lengthy game I've been playing for the past couple of weeks that's still in progress, if you want to check out what a replay looks like firsthand. Simply open that link in your browser on your computer or device, manipulate the slider to scroll through the game in order, or tap any of the words from the list below to see them played.
Besides this cool replay feature, the latest Letterpress update also includes an improved dictionary, a clarification of the "prefix" rule, and tons more tweaks and fixes. Oh, and just in time for the holidays, the word Christmas has been banned from use. Hey, it's a proper noun, it's not allowed no matter how good you've been this year. At any rate, Letterpress remains one of the most well-designed games I've played, along with being a lot of fun. So be sure to check out the latest update and the neat new replay feature.
In my apparent unintentional quest to provide a splash of snooty culture to everywhere I contribute, what came to mind for me while playing Word Derby [$0.99 / Free], Chillingo’s newest addition to the word-game oeuvre (nope, that isn't the snooty part of the sentence), is the inherent unfairness of competitive word games explored in the Broadway musical 'The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee' song “Pandemonium” (yup, that’s it).
The gist of the song is that spelling against your rivals or friends relies on the luck of the draw: You might get “elephant” and I’ll get “tuberculosis” (a word I actually drew in the fourth grade, that I got eliminated from the spelling bee with). Many iOS word games attempt to even the playing field by giving everyone the same letters to take a spelling machete to, and there haven’t been many new wrinkles added to it since. Word Derby is a little overzealous in its attempts to jazz things up, but more of the ideas work than misfire here, meaning it merits a look — particularly if you’re a fan of Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] or Scramble With Friends [Free / Free].
How this tarnishes both Words With Friends and Scramble's crowns somewhat is in its execution: You can play with four people total (instead of just one other) and there is a greater emphasis on spelling a higher-scoring word instead of a bunch of words.
I envy writers who can always find the word they need, who can tumble through phrase after phrase and arrive at the end in short order. I tend to write ponderously, poking around for the best word for the job and questioning whole paragraphs as I go. That's the kind of thinking that's sure to get you killed in Writer Rumble [$0.99], a word game that isn't for the slower and steadier among us.
No, the preferred strategy in this game seems to be to smash as many three-letter words into your opponent's face as you can in short order, then scramble the board and try again. That's certainly a good rumble, no arguments here. I just can't help but feel I'm letting someone down when I throw down as Homer or Lovecraft with a staggering series of hits like Bat, Bats, Baste, Stab, and my crushing finisher, Stabs. Not a terribly eloquent combo, you know?
Writer Rumble is certain to draw in literary types with its aesthetic experience. You play one of six characters lovingly drawn from the history of the written word. Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, Agatha Christie, the brothers Grimm, Homer and H.P. Lovecraft are all present and ready to rumble. They're cleverly described, humorously animated and I adore each and every one of them. I only wish their unique characteristics came through while playing.
Still, when they battle their way through the single-player survival mode, they travel through great libraries and battle literary demons. They bear special powers that let them manipulate the letters before them. Between rounds, Writer Rumble shares quotes about writing, writers and the power of words. It's such a perfect environment, such great trappings for a word game. If the rest of the game could match up with that experience, no lover of words could resist.
Instead, we have a competitive word game that fails to significantly distinguish itself. It's played on a five by five grid of letters. In multiplayer, both players scramble to find words made up of three or more adjacent letters, launching an attack with each one they select. The board stays static throughout. It's Boggle, but scored as you go.
There's a bit more to it, but not much. Letters have point values, so more complex words have some benefit. Each character has a selection of power-ups that can be used either against the enemy, for a higher score, or more survivability. The only one of these that regularly comes into much use in most matches is scramble, though, as your new best friend for clearing the board when you can't immediately see an unused word.
Feel Every Yummy, the studio behind the game, came close to elevating Writer Rumble beyond being a brief distraction. The power-ups, the survival mode—these things hint at a deeper experience that wasn't quite realized. Instead, you can look forward to frantic and brief matches online, via Bluetooth, or across the screen on iPad. There isn't much else to do. This isn't a terrible thing, but it's also not all that compelling in the long run.
There is one outstanding problem worth mentioning: multiplayer connectivity is a mess right now. Server connections drop regularly, opponents drop out mid-fight (a problem that may have more to do with the win/loss ratio than the servers), and there are far too many long waits for an opponent to notice an invite or successfully connect. Presumably some of this will be fixed up - the developers are already working to improve the servers.
If nothing else, Writer Rumble is a game worth keeping an eye on. There is a near-painful amount of potential here, for what is already a reasonably entertaining multiplayer game. If the kinks are ironed out and a bit more goes into making the game and the characters within it stand out, it could be outstanding. As it is, this is a game that will delight the quick-fingered and quick-witted amongst the more literary minded in our audience. There are far worse things to be.
You know that feeling you get when you play an RPG and you manage to work your way down every trail and fill out every inch of the map? Apply that to word games and you have Chris Garrett's QatQi [Free], a game that's as much about exploring as it is about spelling.
That's not to say it isn't about spelling at all, though. Those of us with minds for 8-letter words and endless combos of prefixes and suffixes will dominate. It's just that exploration and tactics play a huge role in the breakdown of every final score, and they can't be ignored. The wide maps of QatQi free us from the yoke of the typical word game grid. It's a rejuvenation the genre badly needs.
It's not as though I need another word game. I mean, just look at the embarrassment of riches we've had in that genre over the past year or so. But Kieffer Bros. keeps making these little games that don't seem like much on first look and then sink in their hooks and never let go, so it was a pleasant surprise when Spell Rift [$5.99 (HD)] landed on my desk.
When the game wrapped up 21 levels later, I was still thoroughly pleased. Spell Rift might not look like much—a small grid, a bunch of letter tiles, and a thoroughly standard scoring mechanic—but it's what it's missing that casts the hook. There's no space to move in Spell Rift's grid. It lacks the relief of wide open spaces. There are just 35 tiles, and every one that's wasted is one less opportunity to spell something worthwhile.
Claustrophobia might be the name of the game, but it doesn't count for much until the stakes are raised. Spell Rift's first few levels are as typical as it gets, and that's just not much fun when you have so little to work with. The game pushes you to do your best, but it still starts out too slowly.
When I first heard that Loren Brichter of Atebits – creator of the groundbreaking Twitter client Tweetie (RIP) – was making an iOS game, I was extremely interested. After all, Tweetie demonstrated exceptional UI design and intuitiveness, as well as a clean aesthetic. Put all of those types of qualities towards an iOS game and, yeah, I'm totally on board.
Now the first iOS game from Atebits is finally here, called Letterpress - Word Game [Free], and it does indeed display a remarkable level of design finesse, clean aesthetics, and simple to-the-point gameplay. It's not going to blow you away in the features department, rather it picks one thing to do and it does it extremely well.
In Letterpress's case that one thing is an asynchronous multiplayer word game. Now, I love word games, and I love asynchronous games, and I love the idea of asynchronous word games. But somehow I've never found one that I liked. I've tried to get into Word With Friends [Free / Free], the de facto asynchronous word game, at least ten times by now, and I always end up deleting it pretty quickly.
I think it might be the core design of Words With Friends that rubs me the wrong way. I don't like having point values assigned to each letter. Rather than finding the most interesting word out of your allotment of letters, you're stuck playing a trial-and-error game of what word will land you the most points while trying to take advantage of the bonuses on the board. Somebody described their experience with Words With Friends to me as "tedious", and that totally nails it for me as well.
This is where Letterpress differentiates itself. It gives you a 5x5 grid of letters to choose from. Each letter used is worth just one point, which obviously makes bigger words worth a bigger score. But Letterpress isn't just about who can rack up the highest total score, it's much more about trying to outmaneuver your opponent and playing the board itself so that you wind up having the most points by the game's end.
Each letter you use in a successfully played word gets branded your color on the board. When it's your opponent's turn, they can try and use your colored letters and "steal" them back in their own word, changing them to their own color while also taking away the points you previously earned for using them. This will go back and forth until every letter on the board has been switched to a color, and the player with the most colored tiles (and thus the highest score) is the winner.
Here's where things get tricky. You can also "lock up" a letter tile by changing all tiles surrounding it to your color. So, if one of your colored letters is surrounded on all four sides by more letters of your color (or three sides if it's a tile in the corner of the board) then the surrounded tile becomes a darker version of your color and is "locked." A locked letter can still be used by either yourself or your opponent in subsequent turns, it just won't be worth any points if you do use it.
It's a small aspect, but it toally changes what would normally be a pretty simple back-and-forth word game into something much more strategic. In addition, if you use and reclaim the letters that are surrounding an opponent's locked letter, you'll then "unlock" it and it goes back to merely being a normal tile of your opponent's color, which can then be used to earn a point and reclaim as your own color like normal.
It feels complicated to explain, but trust me when I say after just a few rounds of Letterpress the mechanics become clear. Mastering them, however, is what will keep people coming back over and over again.
Being adept at making fancy words doesn't hurt, but it's also not the most important aspect of Letterpress. Bigger isn't always better, as a shorter word might be able to steal more points from your opponent, or unlock a surrounded tile for use in another turn. It's just as much about planning ahead and looking at the current situation of the board as it is thinking of the biggest, most impressive word, and this is what I love most about the game.
As I mentioned before, Letterpress is an aesthetically pleasing title as well. It uses clean lines and simple colors, with lots of theme choices so you can mix things up a bit if you feel like. The UI is also impressively intuitive, as just about everything you can do in the game is performed just how you think it might be.
For example, if you want to recall a letter from a word you're making, simply tap it to bring it back onto the board. Or if you want to reorder the tiles simply hold down on the one you want to move and drag it to where you want it to be. If it's been a while since you've taken your turn and you want to see what your opponent's last played word is, just tap on their avatar. Practically everything in Letterpress works just how you would expect, and its minimalist style and smooth animation make it feel like a high-end experience, similar to Clear for note-taking.
That's about all there is to Letterpress. It will connect you with random opponents or friends over Game Center for multiplayer, but there is no single-player option or an AI opponent to face if you happen to be offline. Also, Game Center has its own share of quirks with matchmaking, and Atebits has told me he's investigating using his own server infrastructure just to have a bit more control over the experience.
When I said that Letterpress did one thing and did it extremely well, I meant it. It's a fantastic asynchronous online word game and nothing more. It's also a fantastic example of how design can enhance the experience of playing a game, as Letterpress is a joy to look at and to use.
The iOS platform is a great place to test new ideas, and we've seen tons of quirky and inventive games because of it. Get ready to add another one onto the pile as I think Crossword Dungeon [$1.99] is one of those unique ideas that would only come around on something like the App Store. It employs one of our favorite tactics: slap some RPG elements on a tried-and-true mechanic.
In this case it's crossword puzzles mixed with roguelike dungeon crawling at the core of the aptly named Crossword Dungeon, and strangely enough it totally works. The dungeon rooms are in this case the actual letter tiles of various crossword answers, and your guess as to which letter belongs in each square acts as your offense against the enemies lurking about.
As someone who can get pretty obsessive about both reading and video games, I keep expecting gamebooks to grab me by the throat. It seems as though they should be perfect for that: part game, part book, all gripping entertainment.
