Game Reviews

WordsWorth

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WordsWorth
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| WordsWorth

It's a bit ironic that video gaming is often considered a geeky hobby when a lot of games that break into the mainstream consist of pretty geeky ideas.

One of the most significant grabbers of non-gamers is the brain training craze. Boosting your IQ couldn't possibly be geeky when it's so much fun. Consider, then, WordsWorth the ultimate test of non-geeky cred.

Ostensibly a word search game, WordsWorth relies more on the size of your vocabulary than the speed of your wits.

You start with a grid of letters and you need to create a word by forming a connected path. You're always given a minimum for the number of letters that need to be in your words, five being the toughest quota. You can draft words under the limit, but they won't count towards your score.

Trickier letters like 'z' and the 'qu' duo net you extra points and occasionally a green bonus tile will appear, offering a tidy point bonus. Other bonus tiles can be conjured by making a word two letters over the current minimum limit.

The key to getting genuinely impressive word length, though, is in clever use of wild card tiles. These blue tiles can take the place of any other letter. The game will choose the best letter automatically though, so you don't need to worry about selecting one.

Thankfully, the game's dictionary is generous, with thousands upon thousands lying atop of a few more heaps of thousands of words. Three options are available, in fact, for spell checking.

The TWL list is the official Scrabble tournament list for USA, Canada, Thailand and Israel. The SOWPODS list is the Scrabble list for every other English territory - presumably including the UK. Finally, the ENABLE list is presumably an amalgamation of the two.

Features like these are a boon for your confidence in the game when you pull out a bizarre word that you swear couldn't possibly exist.

WordsWorth doesn't share the same plurality in game modes, but it does admirably in covering the basics with Classic and Timed modes.

Classic mode follows the rules outlined above, although occasionally a red square appears on the grid. If you don't get rid of it by the time the timer on the tile runs out, it's game over. Timed mode simply takes the gameplay and adds the pressure of a clock.

Through the settings menu, you can tweak the game extensively, customising the initial minimum word size, how many times you can re-arrange the tiles per level and even the size of the letter grid itself.

The difference between playing on a tiny 4-tile grid and a 7-tile one is arguably at least as significant as the difference between the two modes.

WordsWorth may not necessarily make the most of its features, as there's no game mode to mix the challenges of these additional settings, but they are at least there. The mere existence of them is likely to be enough to satisfy the many who are looking for this sort of word challenge on their iPhone.

WordsWorth

WordsWorth comes with little ceremony, which makes its unembellished wordplay all the more likely to win you over
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