Wordfeud

Scrabble. Everybody knows how to play Scrabble. Not everybody knows how to play Wordfeud, though.

Oh, wait. Yes, they do - it’s Scrabble.

As any seasoned Android Market trawler knows, Google's mobile shopfront is a fetid sea awash with clones. They aren’t necessarily bad games, just solid and unoriginal.

Wordfeud is a perfect case in point.

To begin with, the game will pair you up with a random opponent (or a friend if you have their username or have played against them before).

Seven letter tiles are doled out to each player, who then take turns to arrange words on the board.

All of the familiar bonus squares appear on the board, offering double or triple points for astute or lucky positioning. If you can’t form any phrases, you can pass or swap a number of tiles.

There’s also a useful button for shuffling your tiles around, to get you thinking in a different way and provide fresh inspiration.

It has a few network niggles: sometimes the connection to the Wordfeud servers gets cut off, interrupting the game, while on other occasions you're left waiting around interminably for the opponent to respond and move.

To make up for this sluggish wordplay, you can easily play against multiple opponents at once and set the app to notify you when it’s your turn.

As far as such clones go, Wordfeud is pretty standard fare. It doesn’t offer anything at all revolutionary, and ends up being a respectable, if uninspired, Scrabble facsimile.