Words With Friends [$1.99 / Free] is headed to Facebook. Social giant Zynga Games announced the platform flip this afternoon with a delightful teaser image. Normally, I’d be a little annoyed by the lack of information, but really, what is there to say? Words with Friends is an extremely simple riff on the Scrabble formula with basic visual do-dads and mechanics that we’ve been enjoying for quite a while on iOS.
I’d imagine the reason we don’t have many details here is tied into the fact that nothing meaningful has been changed, aside from the addition of new Facebook-y social elements.
Let's talk about those for a second. PC Mag is reporting that users will be able to sync their iOS and Android games to this particular version. Also, you'll be able to, somehow, post about your current game on your foes' walls. Cool!
Zynga is heavily invested in Facebook, and as you know, the With Friends creator NewToy was grabbed by the mega publisher earlier last year. It only makes sense that we’re seeing its games (under a new name) on this specific platform, too.
Stray Robot Games is a New Zealand based studio, formed late in 2010 who have just released their first iOS game: Wooords [99¢], a minimalistic word game, which involves sliding fridge-magnets around the screen. You've probably seen puzzles in newspapers (or on the App Store) which involve forming as many words as possible from nine letters. One of the letters is the "key letter" and must appear in each word, and if you manage to put all the letters in the right order, you form an elusive "big word" and earn bonus points.
In Wooords, instead of typing words in (or writing them in a newspaper), you simply slide fridge-magnets around to form words, anywhere on the screen. The letters don't have to be perfectly lined up, just adjoining, as the game is clever enough to detect when a word is formed and you'll be rewarded with a burst of stars, a happy sound and some points. An awful lot of effort went into this design decision, too.
For instance, as you move the fridge-magnets, they make little clinking noises as they collide with each other. If you drag a letter between two other letters, they ease apart to make room. And if you form a larger word, the letters subtly decrease in size, so the word fits on the screen. If you shake your device the letters are randomly re-arranged. It's shocking how well this all works.
There's three game modes to choose from. In 'Classic' mode you have unlimited time to form words, which are rewarded by points and stars. Achieving one star unlocks the next puzzle (30 in total), but real satisfaction comes from obtaining the maximum three stars. This mode is about skill and persistence, rather than speed. The second mode is 'Daily Words', which is a daily competition to rank yourself against yourself, friends or the world. A fresh set of letters is released every 24 hours, which gives this game daily re-playability. And lastly, there's 'Word Jam' which places an emphasis on both speed and skill. The goal is to reach the target score within the word and time limit. This involves completing quick-fire rounds, so speed is definitely a factor here.
Wooords can be played casually for fun, but don't let the cute magnets fool you, this can also be a competitive game of speed, skill and strategy as you climb the Game Center leader-boards. The scoring in the old newspaper puzzles (and similar games) was based on the quantity of words found, with bonus points for nine-letter words. But in Wooords the scoring is far more advanced with multipliers for speed, and the number of syllables, which all contributes to the players score and overall "IQ level" rating.
This cute little game has already become a part of my daily routine. It's fun to fling the magnets into words as quickly as possible and as the developer points out, you're also exercising your brain, by testing your "vocabulary, speed and concentration". Wooords is even a universal game, which sweetens the deal even further.
Even though you might already have a ton of similar word games on your device, the clever refrigerator magnet-powered gameplay feels surprisingly fresh, and makes the UI used in previously released word games flat out seem archaic in comparison. Before downloading, be warned: Wooords will make your actual refrigerator magnets seem unresponsive and far less interesting!
Prose With Bros [Free], the interactive sentence-building game that challenges you and friends to construct the dirtiest things that comes to mind, now has 100 new words. Evil Laugh Games reckons that the title now has around 2,000 as of this free update. Let us all hope that the words “snowball,” “camel,” and “gorilla” have made the final cut.
Words, while as crucial as they are to the experience, aren’t the only things added to the latest build. Evil Laugh on its Facebook page mentions that “various” tweaks and fixes have been included or addressed. The richest tweak we’ve spotted so far is the 24-down-to-12 hour voting time reduction, which should make games a lot snappier. Evil Laugh says it's open to dropping that time even lower moving forward and now you also have the option to cancel out of games hung up on other players' moves.
In a prior update, Retina display visuals were added, as well as capitalization and punctuation, and Twitter support.
Prose With Bros might not be a household name yet, but it’s getting the kind of attention that it needs to be a serious contender. We checked out the title back in April, so give that write-up a look if the asking price of $0 seems too rich.
What's My Word? [$0.99] is a board game port that language lovers simply must check out. If you've played the original with pen and paper, you know what to expect. If not, you're in for a treat.
The goal is to discover a hidden six- or seven-letter word. To find it, you need to come up with other, shorter guess words and enter them in shifted positions along the board. Each guess is scored by how many letters match the hidden word, and whether or not those letters are in the right place.
The scoring is the tricky part. It's the only thing that will tell you if you're on the right track. Correct letters in the wrong spot give you 250 points. Correct letters in the right spot give you 1000 points. You're given the total for the whole word, so you'll need to compare all of your guesses and find the overlapping letters and other giveaways. On your 11th guess, you'll either get the correct word, or not. It feels like a wordy version of the classic board game Mastermind, if that makes it any clearer.
What's My Word? is quite the strategic game. You can try to cover as much of the alphabet as possible with your guesses, but this might leave you with a lot of possible letters and no sure things. If you instead use similar words to track down correct positioning, you might finish the game with only two or three correct letters. Words that score 0 are extremely helpful since all their letters are eliminated, but then you lose that whole word from your total score. To make things even more complicated, you don't necessarily need to guess the correct word to get a high score. Balancing all these factors makes for an interesting challenge.
Though the game design is sound, the port's mechanics leave a little to be desired. The Game Center achievements pop up inconsistently and at weird times. Also, I found myself heading to pen and paper to solve some of the puzzles. The game includes a scratch pad to note down the letters that you're sure of and those you've eliminated, but I just don't find it interactive enough to work through all the logic. Not a huge deal, but it's hard to play on the go when I'm constantly looking for a pen.
For the price of admission, you get 50 potpourri puzzles, and daily six- and seven-letter challenges. The daily challenges have Game Center leaderboards to rank your score. If you'd like more content, there are already 19 extra word packs available for in-app purchase, at a dollar each or 10 bucks for an all-access pass. Categories for the extra packs include things like sports, video games, and movies. I've enjoyed playing the extra content, but if you put a puzzle down partway through it would sure be nice to see which category it's in when you come back.
Unfortunately, the multiplayer aspect of the original game has pretty much been abandoned. You can challenge friends by sending them words with categories, but there's no overarching competitive play. If you want to play with a friend locally, the best you can do is enlist their help over your shoulder while you struggle through the solo challenges.
All in all, though, What's My Word? is a great little package. It's even Universal. If you like your word games to come with a big dose of strategy and logic, you should definitely check it out.
Like asynchronous-multiplayer word games? Then Hanging With Friends [Free / $1.99] is the game for you.
Brought to us by Zynga and the folks behind Words With Friends [Free / $2.99 / HD], Hanging With Friends is a strange-but-fun combination of Hangman and Scrabble. Like other asynchronous titles (and exactly like the other With Friends games), you start a game by finding someone to play with. You can find opponents randomly, or amongst Facebook friends or your contact list. You can also find a friend by their username or play locally with pass and play.
Once you've found a friend to play with, you create a word using a random selection of letter tiles. You have a chance to earn bonus points by positioning your letters on double or triple letter/word score spaces. When your word is made, its your opponent's turn to guess.
Guessing is done in classic hangman style. You have a set number of strikes based on the length of the word (shorter words are harder, so you get more chances with them), and you can pick from all the letters in the alphabet. Guess your opponent's word before running out of strikes, and you live to play another day. Fail, and your cute little avatar loses a balloon and gets closer to falling into the pit of lava below.
I'm not the biggest crossword person. I love word games and trivia, but crosswords have just never grabbed me. So I'm a little surprised by how much I've enjoyed playing CRUX Crosswords HD [4.99].
Maybe it's the way it manages to capture the feel of playing on paper without all the messy stuff that goes along with actually playing on paper. You can't beat the aesthetic, with each puzzle laid out on a page of virtual newsprint with a nice clean handwritten font. I can almost smell the ink when playing this game.
Or maybe it's all the helpful little features. You can write in pencil or pen mode, so you know which answers you're certain about and which are still iffy. When you highlight a cell, you can see both the clues that intersect it at a glance. If you're getting close but can't pick an answer, use the rebus option to enter up to twelve options per cell. If you're really hard up, you can set the game to double-check your answers or reveal cells, entries, or the whole shebang. That saved me from a shameful trip to Google on a few occasions.
As a newbie, the source list mystifies me a bit. CRUX has a list of nearly 30 sources, split between U.S. and U.K. style puzzles. A few (those from New York Times and Telegraph) require subscriptions to their respective crossword services, which is to be expected. But I'd love to see a little more information on the sources. Are People Magazine puzzles more or less difficult than Onion A.V. Club puzzles? Or Washington Post puzzles? It's pretty much trial and error for me, but if you know your stuff, the hearty source list should be quite satisfying.
You can download each puzzle as it's published online, and once you've got it its yours to keep. A recent puzzles list lets you hop between in-progress or recently downloaded puzzles at will. You can also create user profiles if more than one member of your household has the crossword bug.
Every time I ran into an irritation, a few moments of investigation solved it for me. I was frustrated that the game would skip over already completed cells when I typed in a full entry. Turns out you can toggle that option off. If the timer makes you feel a little too pressured, turn it off too. There are almost too many ways to navigate each puzzle—you can tap on a cell, tap on a clue, swap between intersecting clues, or use the on screen direction pad to move between cells. You can also set CRUX to show only incomplete clues or only those that intersect your current selection. I have yet to run into a feature or convenience I felt was missing, but if you do, the developers have been taking feedback in the forums.
Like I said, I'm a crossword newbie. But CRUX Crosswords HD is pro. It looks fantastic and comes with everything but the kitchen sink packed in to make your crossword solving more convenient. If you enjoy crosswords, you should definitely give it a shot.
In late April, we took a look atProse With Bros [$1.99 / Free] and were totally impressed by the incredibly unique idea behind the game. Evil Laugh Games successfully turned magnetic poetry into an asynchronous online multiplayer game, complete with players judging the best phrases put together by players.
Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of the fence you're on, the game quickly turned into non-stop sexual euphemisms. Initially, they were amusing, but quickly grew fairly tiring for me as everyone I played with seemed to attempt to string together nonsensical nastiness. Will an injection of 300 new words to the game solve this problem? It's hard to say, but it seems worth updating regardless.
And hey, if weird sexual euphemisms with anonymous strangers on the Internet is your cup of tea, you just got 300 new pieces of innuendo ammo!
Word game aficionados, allow me to draw your attention to a freebie you don't want to pass by. 7 Little Words [Free] is a new word game from the creator of Moxie [99¢ / Free] and Moxie 2 [$1.99]. Those games picked up big followings over time, and this should be no different.
7 Little Words uses a super-simple formula that works really well. It feels a bit like a crossword or anagram game, and it's got me pretty hooked. Each puzzle presents you with seven clues for seven mystery words, and twenty two- or three-letter combinations. Put the letter combos together to make words that fit the clues. Your goal in each puzzle is to use up all the letters to create seven words.
Words With Friends [2.99 / Free / HD] has dominated the multiplayer word game genre on the app store for a long time, but recently some new competitors have elbowed their way in: Kalimat [$2.99 / Free] and Wordfeud [Free]. We've loved Words With Friends since way back when, but it can't hurt to see what the competition has to offer.
Both games are Scrabble-style word games with asynchronous multiplayer - Kalimat through OpenFeint, and Wordfeud through its own system. Both also have free, ad-supported versions to try (Kalimat's cripples some features). But there are a few things that set these games apart from each other.
Wordfeud beat Words With Friends to Android earlier this year and then made its way to the App Store. It's not pretty, with its muted colors and plain interface, but it's quick. I ran into a few small bugs, but nothing game breaking. Currently, it supports six dictionaries, including Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and both English tournament dictionaries (TWL and SOWPODS).
Surely you're one of the eighty zillion people who have downloaded and played Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] with friends, family, coworkers, and random weirdos you don't even know. It's a great game that I can't possibly recommend enough, despite the fact that it was recently assimilated into the Zynga borg. If you dig these kinds of asynchronous online multiplayer word games and are looking for a new fix, you've really got to give Prose With Bros [$1.99 / Free]. It follows a similar model as Words With Friends with a fully functional ad-supported version of the game that you can try first, along with an entirely optional $1.99 ad-free version for people who prefer tossing out a couple bucks to being inundated with advertising.
So what's Prose With Bros all about? Well, if the blatantly obvious title didn't give it away, you form prose, with your bros. Each player is given the same set of words, and they've got to string them together in the most amusing way possible. You submit your prose, and a panel of bros judge your work over the next day. Whoever gets more votes wins. Check out this exhaustive walkthrough the developers provided us:
I'm not entirely sure if Prose With Bros will have the insanely long lasting appeal that Words With Friends has had, but if you like silly multiplayer word games, there's really no reason to not download the free version and give it a spin.
While I'm not the retro overlord our own Blake Patterson is, I've always thought it would be super cool to have a cocktail arcade machine. Even though the iPad doesn't have the 30 years worth of pizza grease on it like your typical Pac-Man cocktail table would have, the iPad is a surprisingly good substitute when it comes to face to face single device multiplayer. Where am I going with all this? Well, Super Cosmic Word Snake [$2.99] combines so many things I like in an iPad game it's almost like 3V Games built their game off some design document of mine that I haven't even created yet. It's dripping with retro charm, has simple (but incredibly fun) two player single device multiplayer, and even has Game Center.
To start playing, you need to situate the iPad between you and a friend and flip a coin (or somehow determine) who is going to play which side first. As the first player, you're responsible for growing the super cosmic word snake as much as possible. Adding body segments on to the end of said snake is as simple as hitting the 7 letter buttons at the bottom of the screen to make a word. The first letter of the word you form must start with the last letter of the worm itself. The snake then, well, snakes around the screen towards the opposite side.
Here at GDC 2011 I sat down with Gian Cruz from Feel Every Yummy to check out their new game WordFighter. Basically WordFighter is a word game like Boggle or Scrabble with an added fighting game component layered on top. Players will “fight” each other by creating words from a 5x5 grid of letters over 3 timed rounds. Each letter has a point value and the total value of created words determines the damage dished out to your opponent. As you create more words you’ll earn special bonuses to use which vary amongst the planned 6 characters. These will either heighten your own offensive exploits by giving your increased damage or make things harder for your opponent’s endeavors by mixing up the game board or forcing them to spell words backwards.
The concept works incredibly well even in this pre-alpha version of WordFighter. The plan is to offer typical local multiplayer options, same device multiplayer on the iPad, and online multiplayer for all versions in both real-time and asynchronous turn-based fashion similar to Words With Friends [$2.99/Lite/HD]. Eventually an Android version of the game will allow for cross-platform play between iOS and Android users. The same device iPad multiplayer is especially fun as you’re literally elbow-to-elbow with your opponent frantically making words and dealing damage to each other, as you can see in the following video.
WordFighter is still in a really early state, and may even undergo a complete art style overhaul before its final release, using stylized versions of characters from popular literary works rather than anime style fighting game characters. Despite how the game ends up looking, the core concept is a lot of fun, and if Feel Every Yummy can find a way to offer a solid turn-based online multiplayer experience then WordFighter could end up being a hit. We’ll have more on WordFighter in the coming months as development continues towards its planned Summer release.
Even developers who don’t normally fiddle with their prices are now fiddling with their prices. For the first in almost two years, Imangi Studios tells us, the price of Imangi: The Game [Free] has been dropped. But get this: it’s free and will remain so for “the foreseeable future.”
When we took a look at the game back in 2008, we praised the word game’s hook. It’s something of a cross between Scrabble and a Rubik’s Cube -- you’re presented with a cluster of lettered tiles that you need to arrange in as many words as possible horizontally and vertically with mighty swipes of columns.
It’s a neat game and, well, pretty popular amongst the word game and puzzle crowd. So popular, in fact, that the husband and wife crew who created it were able to eventually build a company around the success of it and their other titles. Dig Max Adventure [$2.99]? Thank Imangi.
Check out this video of the game in action to get a better sense of what I’m talking about if I failed you with words.
We've received word that InMotion Software, the creators of I Dig It and Dungeon Defense, has slashed the prices of a chunk of its iTunes portfolio. As of yesterday, several of their titles became cheaper than before:
I Dig It, $0.99 - [iPad] - [Review] - In I Dig It, you play as Farmer Lewis, a man who is in a bit of a monetary pickle and needs to pay the mortgage on his farm. Naturally, when faced with financial difficulties, the first thing that comes to mind is retrofitting an old bulldozer into a digging machine to search for over 60 types of subterranean treasures beneath your homestead. The iPad version, I Dig It HD [$2.99] is also on sale, and sports many improvements mentioned when we first got our hands on it.
I Dig It Expeditions, $2.99 - [iPad] - [Review] - Continuing on his adventure, Farmer Lewis strikes it big from the original I Dig It (spoilers?) and decides to take his digger on the road. In Expeditions, you dig in many different locations, including a crazy underwater level. If you liked I Dig It, Expeditions is as close to a "must-have" as you can get.
Dungeon Defense, $0.99 - [iPad] - [Review] - An odd twist on tower defense that puts you in charge of a dungeon, and you need to place various minions to defend it. The iPhone version has been 99¢ for a while, but if you've got an iPad Dungeon Defense HD [$1.99] is worth picking up while it's on the cheap.
Professor Wordington's Spellatorium [$2.99] is one of the few InMotion-developed joints that didn't receive a cut. The reason is probably tied to the fact that the game just released on the App Store on December 19 -- a mere few days ago.
Prof Word seems pretty cool based on our limited time with it so far. It's a word in which you and an opponent take turns adding letters to a word fragment. The point is to not be the dude who ends up spelling a word, or, additionally, be the first dude to point out that a word cannot be spelled from the growing letter cluster. Basically, the game boils down to tricking someone and knowing the dictionary.
Also, there's a layer of RPG elements that spice up the adversarial play. Each word fight has multiple rounds since each opponent has a health bar. You earn and find items that magnify the amount of damage you can do in a round, as well as blunt the impact of screwing up. And if that wasn't enough, there's InMotion constructed a hip, limited environment to explore and find dudes to fight inside.
Prof Word is available for the iPad now and we've been told that a Universal app update has been submitted to Apple. Check it out if this all sounds hip to you, or, hey, grab I Dig It's bangin' follow-up on the cheap.
There's an odd social disconnect in most "social" games. You can't rate each other's work. In life we wither or thrive under the scrutiny of peers, and whether this pressure is good or bad, it informs what we do and how we approach a given task or problem. This is what drew me to Haiku Wind Pro HD [$.99] for the iPad, oddly enough.
Haiku Wind Pro is a social-focused joint that encourages people to write and then rate anonymous haikus. The rating process is streamlined; a simple thumbs up and thumbs down indicator appears above each finished haiku. You need only click on one or the other to bring down righteous judgment.
The game launched last night, so the audience pool is shallow, but you can already see how others' successes are informing or influencing new works. For example, my creative haiku based on the popular song "The Thong Song" is currently sitting at a -1 rating, while other more original, much more flowery haikus are receiving praise from others. The fledgling audience expects deeper, more garnish-laced poems and, as a result, that's the majority of the content.
Imagine if Farmville [free] allowed you to rate each other's crop placement or Bejeweled Blitz let you suggest the next move. Now, imagine that this rater or suggester was just a dude on the 'net. You might think twice about how you play, right? This is what's happening in Haiku Wind Pro and it's neat to watch unfold, though its admittedly, very limited action at the moment.
Another factor that majorly weighs into you producing the best, perhaps most popular works (as, perhaps, influenced by prior works) is the game's persistent leveling system. As your poems are received well by others and you rate, you'll gain levels. Haiku Wind Pro, in this way, is like an RPG where the experience points have been replaced by some sort of shared social currency.
The streamlined UI in Haiku Wind Pro also does its part in making it easier to rate and produce; it's very, very simple. To the left, you'll always see the latest haikus in a swipe-down, Twitter-style menu. To the right, you'll see your current haiku and what level you're at, denoted by a style of mask.
There's not much more to Haiku Wind Pro; it's a barebones game with a clever idea. But I think it's a fascinating app in that illustrates a missing piece in our increasingly connected digital existence -- actually connecting with people with what we've done or created. Also, it's a neat study in how we inform each other in a confined space.
Words With Friends [$1.99 / Free] is headed to Facebook. Social giant Zynga Games announced the platform flip this afternoon with a delightful teaser image. Normally, I’d be a little annoyed by the lack of information, but really, what is there to say? Words with Friends is an extremely simple riff on the Scrabble formula with basic visual do-dads and mechanics that we’ve been enjoying for quite a while on iOS.
