Pros: Scrabble with friends near and far on your schedule
Cons: A few minor
ones, but nothing major
The Bottom Line:
Have fun while playing
Scrabble at your convenience
Whose turn is it now?
I started hearing about the iPhone app Words with Friends in
the middle of 2010. I didn't want to
give it a try because I'm not a huge fan of Scrabble. But I finally gave in around
Thanksgiving. The result? A month later, I bought the pay version, and
I am still happily playing months later.
(Please note, I didn't say I was playing well.)
If you are at all familiar with Scrabble, then you already
know how to play this game. You and one
opponent take turns creating intersecting words on a giant grid. You have seven letters at a time to chose
from, and each letter is assigned a point value based on its rarity and
difficulty to play. For example, Q is
worth 10 points while E is only worth 1 point.
When you play letters to make a word, you gets the points from those letters
and any letters on the board you used.
Additionally, some of the squares on the grid are bonus
squares, either for letters or words. If
you play on those, you can get double or triple the normal value.
There are about 100 tiles in a game, and once they have all
been played (or both people are stumped and pass), the game ends. While there are still tiles out there, you
can swap some or all of your tiles in exchange for a normal turn, hoping to get
something more useful.
The game play itself is fairly straight forward. You put your finger on the title you want to
play to "pick it up" and drag it to the part of the board where you
want to play it. When you do that, the
board in that area gets a little bigger, so it is easy to put your titles in
the right squares. If you want to
increase the size of the board at any time, double tap on the area, and it will
get bigger. A second double tap will
make things small again.
The graphics of the game are as good as they need to
be. The game board and titles look
fine. It doesn't look amazing, but it
doesn't look horrid either. There is
very little sound to the game; basically, it makes a small thrilling sound when
you take a turn and another sound when you win or lose at the end of the game.
The genius of this game is that you can play it against any
friend who also has the app as it fits into both your schedules. While a few times I have played a turn and
had my friend take their turn right away, it is usually an hour or two to
several days before they take their next turn.
I know I usually try to take any turns I need to before work, and I'll
have several turns waiting for me when I get home again. Some games are finished within a week while
others take two or three, just depending on what is going on in our lives.
Yes, I just said turns, plural. With this game, you can play multiple games
at once against different opponents, or even the same opponent. I usually have nine different games going on
at the same time. There might be an
upper limit on number of games, but I haven't found it yet.
So, how do you find friends?
If you are looking for someone you know, you pretty much have to ask
them their user ID. There is no way to
search by real name. You can have the
game post on Facebook and Twitter for you, asking your friends and followers to
play with you. You can also have the
game randomly assign you an opponent. I
haven't tried this last option, so I don't know how well that works out.
If you want to play with someone who is in the same room as
you, you can also play a game where you pass it back and forth. Again, I haven't tried this option, but it's
a great feature.
Finally, you can chat with your friends while playing. Before or after a turn, you can go to the
message screen and type out a message.
It will be there waiting for your friend when they take their next turn. Most of mine involve insightful things like
"Great job," but sometime I'll use it for a quick message to find out
how a friend who is sick is feeling or something like that.
The biggest catch of the game is that you must to be
connected to the internet to even get the game to come up. I play on my iPod Touch, which can only
connect to Wi-Fi. When I'm away from
home, I can't play. Obviously, that is
much less an issue if you are playing this game on an iPhone or playing the
version created for the iPad.
I mentioned earlier that there is a free version of the
game. I had that for about a month. There was a small ad at the bottom of every
page, which was fine and easy to ignore.
What was much more annoying was the ad that would pop up after every
turn. Sometimes, they wouldn't load, so
you'd have to see a second ad. And the
way to get rid of the ad seemed to change from advertisement to
advertisement. The pay version of the
app is usually $2.99, but they put it on sale around Christmas to $0.99. I went a head and bought it, and I'm glad I
did. There are no more ads at all. In very spoiled and won't go back. If you aren't sure how much you might use
this game, I'd suggest the free version to start. If you only take a turn every few days, then
that's probably all you need. However,
if you are playing a lot, you'll want to upgrade to the pay version. No need to worry, all your games in progress
transfer over no problem when you do.
The biggest thing I wish either version of this game had was
a way to make notes to yourself. Quite
often, I'll see a great move with my new tiles, but by the time I get back to
that particular game, it's been several hours (or longer) and I've taken turns
in other games, so I don't remember what I once saw.
I still find myself struggling with winning this game at
all. Every time I do, it's a major victory. But my friends say I am getting better, so
that makes me happy. If sure if I had
played Scrabble more growing up, I'd be much better at this game.
Even though I don't win often, I still have fun playing
Words with Friends. This was the first
app I actually bought, and it will be money well spent.
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