I love word games. I can’t get enough of them.

Scrabble and Text Twist online are two stand-bys of mine, the first going back to childhood, and the second stemming from High School. But other than just solving anagrams in my head – when on road trips, boring my friends to death, finding most people, and usually I, too, are horribly slow and dull-witted  – I’m not terribly familiar with most word games. I suppose Hangman counts, as does this odd game I own called Scutineyes, that no one seems to know about but me, a game fascinatingly complex and heavily reliant on a vast vocabulary and knowledge base (I relish having an encyclopedic knowledge of dogs and using this to my advantage in this game).

I recently came upon a delightful game called Scramble, for the iPhone, a new version of Zynga’s popular social game, that actually takes its influence from old-school Boggle, without all the noisy plastic clanging of lettered dice in their clear box and templates. To play, you simply tap or drag the letters to form words on the board, trying to form as many as possible in the allotted timespan of 2 minutes. Words must be three letters or longer, with longer words earning more points – the game will save all your “Super 6′s” (words comprised of six letters) in your Trophy room. Sometimes, when staring at the screen too long, so long your pupils waver and dilate unnecessarily and an impending migraine is felt, the letters becomes a jumbled mess of un-navigable trenches where finding a word is all but impossible. To shake up your perspective a bit, touch opposite corners of the boards and twist to rotate, give yourself a fresh angle, or literally shake your iPhone. I prefer the shaking. Shaking is fun.

At first, I was pretty rusty in the gameplay and settled mostly for three-letter words – dig, wig, toe, tea, eat, ate -, usually ones that interconnected with one another for logical ease of play, but also to build upon my long dormant skills of expanding upon a word, finding where hidden nooks and crannies of letters lead to bigger, badder word sources of vocabulary. The dragging mechanism is the game is easy and intuitive, and lends itself to quicker play against a ticking clock than individually tapping each letter; a nice, pleasant bubbling sound is heard as you connect the letters, each one encased in a yellow highlighter color and pulsing to a larger size, and the chosen letters show in the bar above with the point value if accepted. After the time runs out, some clapping is jubilantly heard, as if to ease your nervousness and encourage you to play more. It certainly worked in my case!

I really like how the game makes a point to show all the hidden words in your game board once the time has run out and you’re mind is utterly spent trying to finagle letter combinations into possible words – there comes a point in the game where after you feel you’ve scoured the board dry, you’ll try connecting letters in the desperate, neologistic hope that “meggle” is a word. Having the vast, complete list of words before you will humble your broad-chested, harrumph of victory in two seconds flat, especially after realizing your once impressive tally of 40 words pales to the 96 total words on the board. Oh, and I’m not talking about commonplace words either. It’s pretty embarrassing to play this game if you have a paltry vocabulary – heard of aurist? Diurion? No? How about rusine or ootheca? Cricts? Orcin?!? Too bad, better luck next time.

If challenging yourself becomes too defeatist, or if you feel your brain is expanding to the point where you need to show off your new, awesome vocabulary, you can opt to play online against thousands of Scramble players, annhilating in numbers, or succumbing to last place (bwaaahahha). Playing online is actually my favorite form of playing, because it feeds off that competitive drive to just DO BETTER, and seeing the tiny picture profiles of the biggest challengers you’ll be facing is only more fuel for the fire. If you have a Facebook account and friends who currently play, or would like to play Scramble, you may invite them, even challenge them to a game. Otherwise, when hanging out with friends and feeling like a linguistic guru, play the Pass N Play option with up to three players, so each of you takes a turn with the iPhone.

You can’t escape vocabulary, so why not play in all avenues of life?