Wordulous

Unless you're Steven Fry, chances are word games occasionally make your mental powers feel clunkier than Riverdance performed in clogs.

Strangely, those moments of hair-tearing anxiety when you just can't make a work out of Q, O, S and X are all part of the fun in word games. It's frustrating, irritating, repetitive and utterly addictive.

Wordulous retains this set of oddly enjoyable traits, along with the well trodden template that suits the genre, while adding an online multiplayer mode with clever Facebook integration.

In the single player Examination mode, you're presented with six letters with which to make as many words as possible. Each letter can only be used once and the bigger the word is, the more points are awarded. The blackboard above the letters displays the number of different word possibilities in the form of dotted lines, where the number of dots corresponds with the number of letters in that word.

One of Wordulous's more refreshing aspects is that once you achieve a certain number of words or points with a single set of letters, you're allowed to call up a completely new set of letters by hitting the ABC button in the bottom-left corner of the screen.

This means less time is spent trying to figure out the last few possible combinations of the same letters you started with, after you have correctly guessed the majority of possible words. The trade off is that you'll find yourself often repeating words throughout a round. This small measure of repetition is worth the lack of head-scratching that's avoided as a result.

After each round you are awarded one of 35 ranks based on your score, which range from Hermits and Magicians to Cavemen and Cheerleaders.

Everything is, as you might expect, played against the clock. In Practice mode, however, you can play without a ticker, simply to try and boost your vocabulary skills.

The online multiplayer mode, Challenge, allows you to look for one on one competitors either via your phone's Contacts or via your Facebook friends list, which is a nice touch.

Sadly, you don't seem to be able to post your scores to a facebook account via Facebook Connect, which is a misstep given Facebook's inclusion in soliciting multiplayer matches. That said, the game does have its own online leaderboard, where you can view the scores of all the most linguistically talented in the land.

The pastel shaded graphics and see-saw nursery rhyme score are a smart match for the gameplay and the overall presentation is friendly and inviting. Everything is stitched into a cohesive, satisfying whole and the option to continually call up fresh letters is a noteworthy, quiet innovation that helps to avoid the frustration that plagues similar titles.

Despite the odd quibble, Wordulous is a likeable swot in the iPhone spelling bee contest.