Words With Friends

Words with friends isn’t you, me, and a dictionary; it’s a take on Scrabble(TM) developed just for the iPhone and Touch. The play is the same but the board layout is unique.  You’ll find double word and triple letter scoring just not in the same spots.

WWF is entirely touch play, beginning with game selection.

Words with friends screenshot game selection

Games where it’s your move are displayed in time sequence from most recent opponent move to oldest. In the shot above you’ll notice the eyes. Those indicate your opponent is watching the game. Additionally, if a number is displayed on the line, it means you have chat messages waiting for you in the game.

Tap on any Words with line and the game is highlighted. The screen then slides to the left displaying the board.

Words with friends screenshot playing board

The game board has two views. Zoomed out if the default. Zoomed in allows you to move it around.

Words with friends screenshot zoomed game board

Playing is easy; just tap the letter and drag it onto the board. If it ends up on the wrong square, just tap and drag it again.  There are buttons to Play (submit), Recall (clear placed letters), swap (allows swapping letters, don’t preselect, select after hitting swap), and Resign.

Topping up the screen are the Games and Chat buttons. Games goes back to the sorted list. Chat takes you to chat just for that specific game.

Play isn’t instant or demanding. Each player takes their turn and then the game waits for the opponent to make their move. There is no game timer, nor nudge option.

The game uses built in spell check, preventing players from making illegal moves. As in Scrabble, words formed cross-wise also must work..

Locating other players is a bit odd. You can invite someone from your contact list, a random person, search for another player by name, or choose Pass and Play.

Pass and Play means you and your opponent play on the same iPhone versus each other. You just take a turn and pass the iPhone over.  I’ve not tried this mode out yet.

The game is crash free, plays with wireless, and has push notifications. Being so easy to pick up and play makes this a great value and an equally great time sink.

Words With Friends on iTunes Store

Above is a screenshot of the tile values for Lexulous, the word game, on Facebook. The tile values on Lexulous aren’t quite in line with official Scrabble rules.

This changes the strategy not at all in my book. The letter values are basically the same, and stagger the same. The Q and Z values are the only ones jumping more than 1.

Board layout has a bigger impact on strategy and play styles. The arrangement of bonus squares varies significantly between the two. This difference accounts for a noticeable difference in scoring and even swings in scoring.

Perhaps you’d like to challenge me on either game?
Join a Lexulous game on Facebook.
Join a Scrabble game on Facebook.

Yours,
Todd

@tojosan on Twitter

I wrote before about Scrabulous being dead and reborn. It ended up being mostly dead. Hasbro at their lunch and put them down, or so the world thought.

Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla are back in the game, more exactly, back in the word game business. They’ve brought us the new game, Lexulous.

Lexulous is a tile based game, much like Scrabulous was. Scoring is still based on tile values and positional bonuses. Play proceeds pretty much the same as well, with turns between the players.

So what’s different? Honestly it’s about the values. The game board is a different layout than the original style. Additionally the squares offer different bonus levels that before. To add another change, the tiles also have different values than before.

All in all these changes result in a different game, but one that reminds you at every turn of classic Scrabble. Heck, here’s the board.

So there you have it, Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla have brought us back a classic word game with a different face. They’ve hopefully done enough with changing up features, and adding some Facebook friendly play enablers that the fans will come back.

Cheers to you brothers Agarwalla!

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.

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.