Wordfeud review

In less than five years, smartphones have become the hottest gaming devices around. It was not so long ago that if you wanted gaming on the go you either had to have a Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Today any top of the range smartphone you can buy will easily have enough processing power to handle advanced 3D games that were popular on home consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2 or Microsoft Xbox. This makes me wonder why I still struggle to find triple A gaming apps on the iPhone or Android app stores. It appears that most mobile developers are still creating games that conform to the lowest common denominator; i.e. low cost experiences for casual audiences. It’s also argued that these touchscreen only devices have limited control options which adversely reduces the types of games that can be released. Whatever the reason, for me any gaming I do on my iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S tends to be of the quick pick up and play variety. One such genre which really excels on these devices is the Word Puzzle Game.

I’ve always been a fan of traditional word games such as; Crosswords, Scrabble, Boggle and the like. They tend to stimulate my brain just enough that it feels good without feeling like you’re at school reading boring text books. It’s no coincidence that word games have been written for computers since the dawn of time itself, well the last fifty years at least. They are not technically demanding in terms of processing power or graphical dexterity, as long as the system can display text on a blank background you can create a word game to run on it.

Scrabble is one of my favourite board games and every few months I get the game down from on top of the wardrobe. Maybe I’ll end up sounding like an old fogey but I love settling down with a drink, a few snacks and a game of Scrab with the girlfriend. However in a house shared with six cats, actually managing to play a full game without a little monster knocking all of the tiles across the room is a different matter. So in recent months we’ve been getting our Scrabble fix online, either on our computers with the official Facebook app or on our smartphones with the help of a Scrabble clone called Wordfeud.

Wordfeud is a homage to the classic board game Scrabble. The game starts with 100 lettered tiles in a bag, each player begins with seven randomly picked tiles and then uses them to play words onto the board. Letters themselves have points attached to them and using rarer more tricky letters such as K, V, Q and Z will earn you more points than common ones like E, B and A.

The skill of the game isn’t just memorizing the dictionary for words with Z and Q in them (although that does help), the board itself is marked with bonus squares which can multiply your score in various ways.

• Double letter
• Triple letter
• Double word
• Triple word

The great thing about Scrabble is that the gameplay is challenging yet the game itself is simple and generic. Therefore this has meant that individual developers have taken the initiative and created great Scrabble clones when the rights holders are too busy counting their piles of money.

Electronic Arts, Hasbro and Mattel have yet to produce an official Scrabble game for the Android platform so WordFeud has taken its place magnificently.

The game itself is basically Scrabble as you know it already but with a few changes to fend off those lawyers. There are still 100 tiles but the variation of letters is slightly different, as are the values attached to them. So where in the official game the letter G scores just 2 points, here in Wordfeud the value is 3 points.

The game has many great features; the biggest being that it boasts cross platform 2 player online play between iPhone and Android. But that’s not all:

• Play against contacts
• Play against random opponents
• Push notifications
• Traditional and random board layouts
• Built in private chat rooms
• Support for up to 30 games at once
• Multiple dictionaries, including non English

Wordfeud is a great Scrabble like experience for your smartphone, the app runs quickly and smoothly and even runs well on a slow data connection. For those that like to take their time, games can be spread over many days providing at least one move is taken per player every 72 hours. The interface looks great and is easy to read, double tapping on the board zooms in for easy tile placement and anyone with at least one finger should be able to play this game comfortably.

There are no annoying sound effects so playing late at night in bed is simple, if you do want some sound then you can allow the game to notify you via your phone’s standard notification jingle but this is entirely optional. In the future I’d like to see a British English dictionary as well as the ability to play against the CPU, but as it is – Wordfeud is the best Word game I’ve played on Android to date. The free version features banner adverts but I really recommend the paid version, it costs under $3 and is totally advert free – well worth 8 out of 10.

Get Wordfeud now
New: Buy Wordfeud from Amazon.com