Words With Friends

This is a fairly standard mobile game, although it does serve its purpose as being a fun distraction to play with strangers. The single player campaign has you competing with ai that uses some truly bizarre and uncommon words that make it a useful way of expanding your vocabulary. It's a basic game, but one that fills its niche pretty well.

 Do you love Scrabble? If so, would you still love it with ad breaks interrupting every third turn or so? What if those ads often featured a drowning cartoon bear and could only be skipped by pressing the tiniest button you could ever possibly imagine with your fat thumb? To be fair, sometimes Words With Friends fails to load an ad and mercifully crashes to a black screen, requiring its victim to restart the app entirely. Of course, you could pay to remove ads altogether, though it's not permanent—ten dollars nets you some in-game trash and 30 days without having to sit through an ad targeted at 5-year-olds and disguising itself to be a currently-running application.

 Okay, I'm not just here to rag on this game because of its ads. Well, I mostly am, but I'm also here to rag on this game because of everything else about it. Words With Friends wants to be a Scrabble clone but very badly fails at doing that. To be sure, it looks like Scrabble, but the gameplay is much different. In Scrabble, the words you play are limited to the words you know—if it's not in the players' mental dictionaries, it's not getting played. In Words With Friends, two major elements come into play to change the game entirely. Firstly, the game lets players move pieces around on the board to check whether or not a word will work. This allows for a lot of guesswork and players are simply allowed to stumble into plays they wouldn't otherwise be able to achieve. This really changes the entire strategy of the game, making it an ineffective stand-in for Scrabble. The other issue is that since the game is not played face-to-face—or at least not in real-time—cheating is incredibly easy for either player, and neither can be quite sure as to whether or not the person on the other end is playing fairly. What I'm trying to say is... there's no way you know what "dialectic" means, auntie! I'm on to your tricks! Erm... anyway, this issue is exacerbated by the game's insistence on pushing players to play against strangers.

 Aside from all of those problems, Words With Friends introduces new elements that feel less like features and more like clutter. Power-ups, a leveling system, unlocks, achievement notifications that fill up the whole screen and are about as annoying as the ads, that kind of thing. I'm a bit less agitated by the bloat here because I could definitely see it appealing to some people, but when I boot up something like Words With Friends, what I really want is Scrabble.

 Beneath all the trash is a somewhat functional but not-quite-the-same Scrabble clone. It's convenient to have a game like this that I can play literally anywhere, turn-by-turn, but anyone looking for a more legitimate digital Scrabble experience should probably just get Tabletop Simulator.