iPhone Word Games Roundup Review

WordJong

• Publisher: Gameblend
• Price: GBP 0.59
• Download size: 8.4MB

WordJong has a small cast of cartoon misfits who tend to say the same thing EVERY TIME YOU SEE THEM.

WordJong takes Scrabble and blends it with Mah-jong, presenting you with an entire year's supply of stacked-tile puzzles, in which the immediate thrill of piecing together the longest possible word is tempered by the need to have usable letters left at the end so you can clear the entire board.

It could have been brilliant, each challenge having a best-case solution and nail-biting finish, as you tactically hoard your vowels for the last few moves, but there are problems. Firstly, this is a case where the simplest online leaderboard functionality would have doubled the pleasure, as the puzzle-a-day structure seems tailor-made for comparing your efforts against other players around the world, and gloating when you come out on top. More seriously, WordJong has a tendency to crash, and sometimes fails to save a score upon completion of a round, which can be extremely annoying, and it won't be long before you butt heads with the game's totalitarian, and yet curiously limited, dictionary. In just one hour-long game, I encountered about five or six words which WordJong didn't know - and we're not talking particularly obscure words either, the most exotic being "Yiddish" - which sort of takes the shine off a game based on pixel-perfect deployment of your own vocabulary.

Until this gets an update, then - hopefully including a way to laugh at your friends' pathetic scores without having to phone them up and compare notes, which can leave you feeling a little pathetic in return - WordJong remains a template for an excellent game rather than an excellent game in its own right.

6/10

WordFu

• Publisher: ngmoco
• Price: GBP 1.19
• Download size: 16.8MB

WordFu has Wi-Fi multiplayer. Use it in public and you're presenting would-be muggers with a powerful score-multiplier incentive.

If you're a fan of Boggle, but always wished it had slightly questionable Jackie Chan-style sound effects layered over the top, your dreams have been answered. ngmoco's jaunty spell-'em-up is about as basic as word games get: shake the iPhone to scatter a handful of lettered dice, spend a few grace seconds flicking any repeat letters into oblivion, and then spell as many words with what you've got until the clock counts down.

Every now and then you'll get a special tile flung onto the screen, allowing you to scramble a single letter, freeze the clock, or boost your score on the next word, but the quirk that really defines the game is the fact that you can use each letter repeatedly within a single word. I've got no idea if Boggle affords the same leniency - I've played by house rules for so long there are now additional play mechanics in my own personal version that control at which point losers have to go and make everyone a cup of tea - but it's a startling piece of generosity in the often prim world of word jumbles, and a welcome inclusion, as it means you can string together some real point-scoring monsters when you're on a roll.

As with WordJong, another welcome inclusion would have been online leaderboards, which ngmoco has apparently hinted at for a future update. As is, WordFu is simple and accommodating, and, if you give it enough time, weaves a quietly powerful spell.

7/10

Scramboni

• Publisher: ByteClub
• Price: Free!
• Download size: 0.4MB

Scramboni has a few things going for it up front: it's free, it rhymes with Zamboni, the most wonderful vehicle ever created, and, unlike any of the others so far, it's online, meaning that while its unscrambling action is entirely generic, there's a tangy hint of competition in the air from the start.

Joining a game sees you thrust into a match with a handful of other players, before you all face off against a series of anagrams. As guidance, the first letter - and often the last - will be highlighted in red, and you've then got twenty seconds or so to submit your answer, knowing that around the world, other players are doing exactly the same thing, and probably doing it a bit quicker, too.

The presentation is basic, but Scramboni turned serious for me very early on, entirely because of the way it feeds a running total of your rivals' scores back to you every few minutes. After a string of rounds where you've come out in the lead (a rare sensation for me), you can almost feel the silent waves of anonymous hate directed at you from a group of people you've never met (this sensation was not quite so rare). All of that, combined with a simple progression system that sees you eventually stepping up a grade or two to take on even longer anagrams, makes Scramboni fairly hard to put down.

8/10

Bookworm

• Publisher: PopCap
• Price: GBP 2.99
• Download size: 9MB

Play Bookworm long enough and you'll discover almost any combination of three letters is most likely a word of some kind.

The people behind Peggle and Bejeweled were hardly going to screw up a casual word game, particularly when they're porting it over from the PC. Bookworm is simplicity itself: make words by linking together adjoining tiles, using each tile only once. Green tiles give points boosts, red tiles burn their way down to the bottom of the map if not used, ending the game, and a quick shake of the iPhone jumbles the tiles up if you get stuck.

There are two modes - traditional, and a rather stressful timed mode, in which tiles regularly combust and turn red, adding an urgency to your spelling - but the real pleasures lie with the twists applied to such a basic premise: the RPG levelling system which doesn't really do much, but offers a delightfully misleading sense of achievement, or the fact that the game rewards unusual words as much as long ones, meaning that dyslexics with a decent general knowledge will not be entirely discriminated against.

And not only did PopCap's title sale through the Yiddish test with flying colours, I have to admit that, randomly jabbing at letters when I got stuck, I did eventually discover a few new words, the best of which - nacreous - I will be jamming into this article later on in a desperate bid to look clever.

This, like Peggle, then, remains a joy to play far longer than its bare bones would suggest, and in the strange world of the App Store, where titles tend to be more like short stories than novels - sparkling, enigmatic, temporary companions rather than a weighty chunk of prolonged engagement - Bookworm is more than worth the price: it's smart, it's charming, and most importantly, it's nacreous.

8/10

New York Times Crosswords Daily 2009

• Publisher: Magmic
• Price: GBP 5.99
• Download size: 3.9MB

I'm going to use this caption to tell you to download Kenji Eno's free App, One-Dot Enemies, even though it isn't in the article.

Aren't crosswords great? Sure, they may not have guns and robots and dinosaurs - except if those are the answers to the clues - but if you've ever, even for a moment, doubted their terrifying appeal, consider this: Gegs (8, 4).

Great they may be, but New York Times Crosswords is not cheap, however. Weighing in at GBP 5.99, and thus brushing against the upper reaches of what most people are willing to pay for any App that won't cause your iPhone to sprout whirling blades and double as a personal helicopter, the final package can feel a little on the skimpy side. There are lots of puzzles, of course - the game offers you one a day, and an archive of over 4000 - but the presentation is basic, the opening screen's jazz accompaniment will eventually make you want to hurl yourself out of a window, and getting about the screens and plodding through the grids, while workable enough, doesn't seem particularly polished.

Equally, the puzzles themselves tend towards pithy one- or two-word clues as opposed to the elegantly tortured enigmas you get in English newspapers - or at least the ones which carry crosswords that don't have a B-list sleb's gurning mugshot trapped in the middle of the grid. Whether this brevity is a concession to the iPhone's screen size or simply how they roll at this particular paper I can't say, as I haven't taken the New York Times since they came out for Warren Harding in the 1920 election - either way, it does take away a lot of the bookish, and often slightly impenetrable pleasures of the best crosswords.

New York Times is strong on content, then, but weak on atmosphere: a great game to take with you if you plan on spending a long time in prison, perhaps, but a little too soulless to brighten up most tube trips.

6/10