Boggle (Smartphone)

After shaking your handset to mix up 16 letter dice, Boggle gives you three short minutes to make as many words out of the jumble of letters on the screen as you can. Words can only be crafted by linking adjacent letters, a minimum of three letters required for each word.

It's over before you can shout out a four-letter word, which is a good thing given the often dull wordplay.

Classic mode follows the rules of the physical game as outlined above, while Advanced mode throws in extra elements to spice things up.

Portal cubes, for instance, exchange the placement of the first and last letters of the previously submitted word. With Panic Flip, all of the letters randomly change when the clock counts down the last 20 seconds of the game.

While these additions deviate from the standard rules, they are much needed variations that help you generate more words and as a result makes the game more interesting. Classic mode is far too dry to keep you coming back. Random lettering poses an enormous problem across both modes, though particularly in Classic.

A shake can lead to a mess of useless consonants or corner dotted with vowels. Toggling portal cubes and panic flip options in an Advanced mode game alleviates this to a degree, but in Classic mode you're stuck with the draw.

There's nothing fun or lexically challenging about trying to form a word out of a 'W' tucked in a corner surrounded by other consonants.

This leaves Boggle, by nature, an inferior word game. The execution is decent enough - a list of words pops up at the end of each game to show you every possible combination of letters, the controls are intuitive, and you can even send scores as challenges to friends (we'd prefer Facebook or Twitter challenges to email, though) - but the core gameplay isn't strong enough to compete with more effervescent entries in the genre.