Entries Tagged 'Games' ↓

It’s alive! It’s alive. Scrabulous closed its doors to North American players not even 48 hours ago. This brought to a seeming end the fun of tens of thousands of players.

Today a new application has appeared in place of Scrabulous; it’s called Wordscraper.

Look familiar? It should be.

The folks at Scrabulous have resurrected the game with a new name, but with some new play options. This isn’t your same old Scrabble game.

Players design their own board layout, placing letter and word multiplier tiles. Tiles can be tagged individually with either a word or letter multiplier with ranges from 2x to 5x. The play is still turn based, and scoring is done the same. Players even get seven tiles per round.

It will be interesting to see if folks will dive right back into the game or not. To make it easier, the Scrabulous application was automatically replaced by Wordscraper. It appears that active games may have been kept as well.

Bonus feature? Once you design a board layout, you can load that for future games. Check out this link to see my creation to a classic Scrabble layout.

Will you join me for a game?

Love Scrabble? Use Facebook? Then you were probably among the hundreds of thousands of players of Scrabulous. Scrabulous was the game of Scrabble online.

Scrabulous was well liked not only for being a fun take on a well known word game, but for it’s interface. Stripped of any pretense of wood and plastic, play was fast and easy. Without fancy graphics or spinning pixels, players could concentrate on the words.

It’s gone now. Gone that is for those in the US and Canada. The rest of the world can still play. For the rest though, they now have the ‘official’ Scrabble game on Facebook.

Yes. The game company Hasbro has brought out yet another version of Scrabble to enjoy. This one has more bells and whistles. Sound effects and spinning pixels are there to spare.

According to the message above, Hasbro is looking at making some of those things optional. This will probably affect the number of folks that become regular players. But will that and speedier play be enough to move the masses that played on Scrabulous?

Will you take up playing Scrabble on Facebook? Will you find solace in other word games? What features will drag you in?

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Bloggers have shown Scrabulous quite a bit of love. Will they continue to do the same with Scrabble? Or will they put down some harsh words?

So what’s up folks with this splash screen? Seriously? Does someone get here by accident?

One of my favorite games but sheesh, more of that will mean less of me.

Pathwords is a Facebook word game by zynga.  If you’ve not played it, but love word games, check out Pathwords.  This article is to give you some tips once you’ve wet your whistle.

First off, it’s important to understand the scoring.  Let’s look at the word chart.

What immediately jumps out to you?  It’s how the points don’t scale up right?  The biggest bang for your buck in making longer words is from 3 letter to 4 letter words.  You’ll do the most to improve your game just getting out of scoring 3 letter words.

Another thing to notice is the significant jump at 7 and 8 letter words. To get there, you’ll have to do something besides look for longer words, you’ll need to create them.

Beyond scoring, there’s another trick to the words.  Have you ever thought you were out of words, even 3 letters long?  Not true.  The game never leaves you without a word.  So another key to mastery isn’t just longer words, by accident, or intent, but learn those three and four letter words cold.

A good example are GET GUT GIT.  Those words occur fairly frequently. Learn the more unusual ones with Z, V and J.  Those will be your most difficult letters to rid yourself of.

The dictionary used is the TWL Scrabble Dictionary. Check out the Official Tournament Word List entry on Wikipedia.

The zynga team provided their own tips in the help section of the Pathwords game.

• Instead of clicking the Submit button, you can click the last letter of your word again.
• You can also drag the mouse to form your word. When you release the mouse button, your word will be submitted.
• Be careful of how you use shuffles. The first one costs a mere 20 points, but they can get very expensive very quickly. If you don’t have enough points to pay for the next shuffle, you can’t use this feature.
• Expert players will manage their letters carefully to help them form big words for huge points.
• Check out your current word right underneath the board. If your current letters form a legal words, the word will be green. If not, the word will be red.

These aren’t word tips, but trust me, playing with mouse drag is the fastest way to go.  I actually find this true even with the touchpad on my Mac Book Pro.

So let’s sum up.

• Make longer words when possible
• Create longer words on your own, be selective when you have choices
• Learn the three and four letter words by heart
• Focus on learning words for V, J, and Z.
• There is always a word.

Let’s get playing.  Be sure to friend me on Facebook and challenge me to a game of Pathwords.

Look what I received for Father’s Day!

Spore Creature Creator is the prelude game to the upcoming Spore game from Will Wright and EA.

The creature creator allows you to design and play with your creatures before the full game comes out in September. Players can design just about any creature they can imagine, controlling the number of eyes, ears, arms, legs, and more. Why limit yourself to a regular bipedal beast when you can give it six arms and eight legs?

Adding things to the design doesn’t just make for looks. More legs equals more speed. More armor means more health, and more eyes can make your creature a charmer. Along with speed and charm, each creation will have various attacks and benefits based on what’s added.

The Spore website has a free version of the creature creator with about 20% of the full range of parts in the full price version.

Spore Creature Creator and Spore is being released in both PC and Mac versions at the same time. Yahoo!

Come visit my Spore page if you will and share yours back, here in the comments.

d3bruts1d says Plurk is the World of Warcraft of micro-blogging.

If you’ve been playing Scramble, the Facebook game by zynga, then you’ve probably noticed the credits you have.  These credits can be used during your turn to get a word hint.

You’ve probably wondered where those credits come from.  Well here you go, there are two ways to earn credits.  One way is invites.

Earn credits by inviting friends to add Scramble to their FaceBook profile. You get two credits for inviting someone that you haven’t invited before. If they respond to your invite within a week, you get an additional ten credits! You can use these credits to get word hints when you’re playing a game of Scramble!

The second way is to log in.  Each day you log in earns 2 credits.

Now those credits don’t accumulate too fast, but I don’t find I use them that often.  They do really come in handy though on those days your just stuck.

Do you used your credits?  Found a secret way to score more?  Wouldn’t use the credits if they gave you 1000 of them?

Let me know.

Facebook holds few attractions for some. But for others, it’s a replacement for Excite and Yahoo games. The bonus being your opponents are taken from your contacts. That aside, there are hundreds of games now available on Facebook.

Few games though are in the category of both challenging and of high replay value. zynga has taken a stab at bringing us some word games that meet both those criteria. Those games are Word Twist, Pathwords, and Scramble.

All three games present time based challenges where word construction is the key. In each case, minimum word length is always three characters. The tiles in each case are randomly arranged and your task is to discover all of the words.

Word Twist presents the player with six letters. The player types or clicks the letters to form words. Score is based on the number of words found, with a bonus for ‘bingo’ words. That’s words of six characters. Here’s a screenshot.

Word Twist allows the players to complete all of their turns without waiting. There is no direct competition between the players. The number of terms and time is set at game creation.

Pathwords presents an entirely different challenge. Where Word Twist gives the player six characters to work with, Pathwords gives a whole field. A picture will help explain.

The players selects the words by clicking on the initial letter of the word and then clicking on the rest of the letters. To enter a word, a double click is required on the last letter. An alternate method is clicking on the first letter and holding the mouse button. The player can then drag over the rest of the letters in the word. When the mouse button is released the word is entered. Wrong words do not score, and clear the letter selection.

Once a word is accepted, the letters in the word are removed from the board. Each column’s letters then slide down and new letters are added at the top. An added feature allows the player to scramble the letters on the board at a penalty of points.

Scramble is my favorite of the three games. Scramble plays like the home game, Boggle(tm). The players take turns finding words in the 4 by 4 array of letters. With the classic tile look, it feels a lot like Boggle.

Players alternate turns finding words. Score is based on word length. There are no bingos or such. Typical games are 5 rounds of 3 minutes each. A word hit feature exits that requires 2 credits each use. Credits are earned on the first visit to Scramble during a day.