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.