But, on to the game, shall we? The game impressed me upon its opening screen and title pages, which are all artistically drawn in a slight cartoonish manner, with well chosen colors, fonts, and sounds, cute maps of the like that reminded of SpongeBob SquarePants. This only made me curious as to why they didn’t extend this pretty design into the actual gameboard, itself, which dulls the senses with its dark brown motif, bamboo borders, and dark, wooden blocks falling at a slow pace, in front of a dim background. I suppose it isn’t too bad, but I was hoping for something a bit lighter and more airy in design, ignoring, of course, that most jungles tend to be dark given their expansive, sun-blocking canopies. The next level, The Desert, is set in what I presume to be a tomb, though it has a slightly metallic, mechanized feel to it, like a robotic chamber, with falling letters that clink together like coins. I do really like the music, though, in The Jungle it being something I can only describe as happy, vibrant tribal music, and in the Desert the music being subdued Eqyptian flute music.  The object of the game is to form words of at least 3 letters, connected either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally (or a combination of these), to earn points – gold, in this game – and succeed to the next level while avoiding enemies on the board, and trying to form five letter or longer words to earn bonus points per round. There are alsomechanisms in each round that help you, such as blocks that will switch letters, time enhancers, bombs that rid the screen of letters you want, and more. Much like Tetris, you don’t have a choice in deciding which letters will appear at what time, but you can move the letters as they fall onscreen – once they strike the ground, however, they become immobile, and it’s up to you to strategize where to place the next letters so you may potentially form words, and eliminate them from the screen.

Normally, this would result in a fantastic game – and it does, to a certain extent. The one, glaring problem with Captain Glyph is purely technical: the interface isn’t quite up to snuff. In other games, like Scramble 2, connecting letters is a breeze, no matter what the angle or order, but in Captain Glyph, it’s nearly impossible to select only the letters you want, without tacking on several other unwanted letters along the way. The blocks aren’t so ridiculously small that your finger wouldn’t be able to squarely tap dead center on them, so what’s the problem here? Why can I not select S-E-R-E-N-E when they’re diagonal to one another, my finger path instead forming a zigzap of S-P-E-Z-T-R- and so forth? It’s especially infuriating because while you’re concentrating on selecting letters, other letters continue to fall onscreen and before you know it, the letters stack to the top of the screen and it’s game over. At one point I was fuming so much I started forming very inappropriate words on the gameboard, only I wasn’t even able to form those correctly. *tears out hair* Foiled again.

For this reason alone, I have been unable to complete Captain Glyph. It’s unfortunate, because I really would like to explore the game further, see the other levels, and just enjoy the game. I could, potentially, just try my luck at forming only horizontal and vertical words, with maybe one or two letters jutting out in a different direction, but even then it’s too challenging to be fun. I did have success with using my pinky finger at an odd, slated angle, but that too takes the joy out of casual gaming. I do, however, see a lot of potential in this game, and I don’t know of any other word game that gives you the option of playing in 6 different languages, so Mars Toad is definitely on the right path. I hope in a future update this gaming issue will be resolved, because I really look forward to more adventures with Captain Glyph.

iTouchiLearn Words consists of three parts: two word games and a series of animations based on the same pool of words to reinforce learning. Simply touch, play, learn and enjoy. Unlike static flash cards, iTouchiLearn Words provides a fun, interactive way to learn, while keeping the sessions short to keep the child’s mind engaged and attentive. The app is simply, but effectively designed – some of the illustrations and animations aren’t the greatest, but I’m sure most young children won’t mind, so long as the adult can get past whatever preconceived biases they may have against less fastidious-looking artwork.

The main menu shows three tabs in the form of torn out sheets of notepad paper, one with ABC, one with a magnifying glass, and one with a film slide showing a baby crawling. The first tab, ABC, is a word game where a picture is shown, along with four possible word choices. The narrator, for example, says, “Touch the dog,” and your child has to figure out which word represents dog. When a wrong word is selected – let’s

Positive reinforcement in action

say cat – the narrator reads the word aloud, but then a buzzer noise is heard, and the narrator repeats the command, “Touch the dog.” This process of elimination continues until your child selects the right word, dog, and applause is heard, a WOOHOO! and a ringing bell. The game is all about positive reinforcement, indicated all the more by the smiling, happy star that appears when a right answer is selected. Over time, the idea is that your child will begin to associate the visual imagery with the word, itself.

The next game, indicated by the magnifying glass, is nearly the opposite of the aforementioned game: this time around, a word is given – i.e. balloon – and three possible images are shown. The process is the same as the last game – your child gradually eliminates choices until the correct one is chosen, with negative and positive reinforcement along the way. The last game, though, is where iTouchiLearn Words truly shines. The last game takes the cognitive skills up a notch by introducing animation in tandem with words, so your child may recognize different words that may be used with the same image, depending on the situation at hand. I really like the egg animation, in particular. First, an egg is shown, with the word “egg” spoken aloud. Next, the egg breaks open and lands in a skillet, where the phrase “fried egg” is heard, along with a sizzling sound. A chicken is then shown, it lays an egg, then egg hatches open and reveals a chick, with the narrator using words the entire time. The chick then goes through a quick growth metamorphisis back into a chicken. It’s actually quite brilliant, and I’m sure, fascinating for a child to behold.

A few of the animations may be a bit difficult to conceive – the animation where the boy is playing catch with a small, rubber ball comes to mind – but given the expansive, cognitive abilities of a growing child, I’m sure everything contained within this app is completely fathomable, and able to be deciphered, tucked away into knowledge. Sure, the illustrations aren’t the greatest, but the app performs well, the narrator is loud and clear, and the app definitely has more potential than other, more static flashcard type apps in the App Store.

Promotion Codes:

NENF6YHPMTJL

YYYPM97ET4EP

AT96JLLLTHL3

*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

ABC Shakedown, upon first impression, is cute and colorful, with happy, upbeat music sure to grab a young child’s attention. I particularly like the artwork – it’s nothing extraordinary by any means, but it’s youthful in its presentation, each image looking as if it could appear in a regular coloring book, clad in the appropriate Crayola crayon striations and color. Each flashcard shows both the uppercase and lowercase form of a letter, an image representing a word that begins with and showcases the letter, and a volume symbol at the bottom that lets the user hear the pronunciation of the sound. The very first flash card is, of course, the letter A, written as Aa, with a picture of an apple beneath. Tap the letters to hear the letter pronunciation (i.e. long A versus short A, as in “bay“), and tap the image to hear a voice say apple out loud, the A really emphasized. When the user taps the volume symbol, a short A is heard (“aah” as in “cat“), so a child can recognize the different sounds of the letter. Obviously, there are more ways a letter can sound (hello IPA guide), but for the purposes of beginning speech, this is a great way for a child to learn. I can remember learning the more difficult sounds of -ch, -th, and -sh as a kid, accompanied by these funny pictures of mouths contorted in such a way so as to effectively reproduce these sounds.

While most of the images are pretty dead on, a few of the images aren’t nearly as intuitive as the others. For I, the developers chose Itch, along with a drawing of an unfortunate person clad in painful-looking red welts, with a hand itching. I suppose it’s good practice to include words that aren’t concrete objects or animals – the word “itch” is much less tangible and requires more critical thinking than, say, “igloo” and dealing with such abstraction can teach children that letters, and the alphabet, are applicable to other areas. In any case, it’s a way to bring attention to the developer’s name. For X, the developer chose “box” instead of the usual “xylophone,” and this forces the child to examine the last letter of the word, rather than the usual first. The app goes a little beyond most children’s conceptual abilities, though, with the inclusion of “edge” for E, accompanied by the visual aid of an arrow pointing to a table’s edge. This might be a little beyond what most children are capable of recognizing, in the same manner that kids at this age are conceptually incapable of recognizing that a shorter glass contains as much volume as a larger one. It’s just a natural part of development and cognition, so perhaps the app would do better with any number of other, excellent choices, like “eel,” or “elephant.” Another case where the app is just ever so slightly off is with the word J. The picture shows a jar of strawberry jam, where both jar and jam begin with the letter J. Here, it’s good to include an image where two objects within are representative of the letter J (it challenges critical thinking), but the image focuses so heavily on the jam, with all its red, strawberry goodness, that most children would immediately think “jam” for the picture, and not conceive of “jar,” which is the word the app chooses to voice aloud. For more intuitive purposes, the app should have voiced jam to encourage an association between the image and what a child would initially think of. Then, an adult can point out to the child that the jam is within a jar, which also begins with the letter J.

Overall, though, ABC Shakedown is a good flashcard app for kids learning the alphabet to practice on their own. Navigating is easy enough with arrows at the bottom of the screen, or a shake to produce a random card. I’m surprised there isn’t also a flipping gesture to switch flashcards, so that kids can rely both on their gesturing abilities, and their symbol recognition (using the arrow to move forward or backward), because it seems both of these conceptual abilities are nurtured in extra doses today, with our iPhones and all their gesture/symbology technology. Regardless, ABC Shakedown is a cute and educational app that will nurture your child’s letter recognition, conceptualizing, and application.

I remember being horrible at Scrabble when I began playing regularly some time in college, jumping for joy when I first hit those double digit scores, and performing obnoxious victory jigs whenever I landed a bingo, to the other players’ collective annoyance. Becoming a better player has definitely humbled my exuberance. Scrabble, I think, is especially hard for erudite folk with an appreciation for the vagaries and intricacies of language. It’s easy to think too critically of a game where the targeted placement of small and common ox can earn you 30 or more points, while the more impressive, and articulate eremite (a recluse, especially for religious reasons) may only tally at a paltry 12. I remember thinking that Scrabble took the joy out of creative vocabulary, the pleasure of laying down an obscure word, in favor of memorizing two-letter word lists and Q-word lists, in the silly, regimented hope of achieving some impenetrable word arsenal. These word lists that every serious player commits to memory just seemed so confining and didactic to me, to warrant any permanent spot in my weekly rotation of board games. But, like a phonetic hooker in those dank, forlorn corridors of unused word games, Scrabble tempts you and weaves words and anagrams in a way no other game does.

Scrabble was released for the iPhone a little while ago, but like most board games cum iPhone games, it has a longevity that renders it ageless. For this adaptation, EA Games took the game by the reigns and added a certain panache that I have come to equate with Electronic Arts: a slick, bouncy soundtrack, excellent interfaces, breezy multiplayer, and easy in-game navigation. The design of both the main screen and the board are digital clones of the actual Scrabble packaging, the red lines, and the Scrabble font near exact replicas of the originals – a definite plus for we, Scrabble aficionados in need of a perfect homage. To play, you may opt for a Quick Play, or connect with Facebook to enjoy a game with your close friends, or just opt for wi-fi multiplayer, to perhaps play with a stranger in your current location. I’m a solo kind of gal, so I usually tap the Quick Play and challenge the CPU, taking great enjoyment in my linguistic overtaking of its, apparently, computationally-challenged battlefront (it has yet to beat me). My one disappointment with Quick Play – and where other games like Words with Friends win me over – is you can only play one game at a time. This is pretty absurd considering you may want a backup game should you hit a roadblock with the first. But, true to Scrabble, or any physical board game, once you start a game, you should see it to the end.

I tend to turn off the music to allay any outside disturbances (how serious do I sound?), but considering it’s light, and possibly the least obtrusive music I’ve heard thus far for a game, I often just keep it on. I also don’t bother with uploading my own soundtrack to Scrabble, but it’s nice to know the option is there, and I’m sure many people play considerably better with Lady Gaga serenading them about their Poker Faces – maybe I’ll try that. By default, Scrabble peppers you with Game Tips – how to move your tile with one finger, while using another finger to move the screen; double tapping to zoom in and ditto to zoom out; pinching to accomplish the same – but you can turn these off, as any regular iPhone user will intuitively figure out how to control the game. The game board is naturally set at a distance so you may view the entire playing field, but whenever you move a tile to play, the game will automatically zoom in to your approached location – otherwise, you may double-tap anywhere on screen to zoom in on a particular location. When setting down tiles to form words, the game will automatically calculate the score, making decisions easier when oscillating between two or more possible plays. Should a word not be valid, the game will tell you, highlighting the words in red – you may then easily take back this play by tapping the Recall button, placing the tiles back on your rack. Shuffling is also made easier with a Shuffle button, to shuffle at random, or you can manually move the letters yourself, definitely more convenient when you’re working out those pesky anagrams.

It’s too bad the relative ease of this Scrabble won’t make winning the game any easier – but wait! For this Scrabble, Electronic Arts threw us a freebie with the Best Word option. Hardcore Scrabble fans will surely scoff at this option, seeing it to be a cop-out for n00bs who don’t have the patience to think critically about what possibilities lay ahead, and that may be a valid concern. It’s definitely easy to drift your glance down at the reassuring heart button, oozing warmth with its Best Word, beckoning all that is safe and assured. I say ignore the button if you’re already an adept player, confident in your abilities, but I definitely won’t tell beginning players to overlook its help.

Sometimes it’s good to get a freebie. For a game like Scrabble, it can point you in the right direction.

Oh yes, that means kid’s apps!

ABC Maze is a recent development by the creators of iWriteWords, a favorite app of ours we gave high accolades several months ago in June. Thankfully, gdiplus knows a thing or two about developing stellar apps. They found a formula that works and they’re sticking to it. Much like iWriteWords, the opening screen of ABC Maze has a kooky giraffe drawing with buttons in the upper right that sway realistically to the ever tilt and turn of your iPhone. Rather curiously, a vroom vroom noise from a speeding car is heard as the app opens, and the glowing, stoplight red background scheme oozes with anticipation, raciness, maybe even a bit of ADHD.

But, don’t crack out the Ritalin just yet, ABC Maze requires time and patience, and is not meant to be a fast-paced game at all. If anything, the game encourages children to fiddle around with the letters, touching them and hearing their pronunciations, tossing them around with the ever-cool, whisper of a cloud physics setting gdiplus flaunts. And, rightly so. With every tilt of the phone, the letters swivel this way and that, rocking gently back and forth as if on well-oiled tracks, their movement latently responding a second or two after you tilt. The movement takes some adjusting to, even for an adult, so it’s a great premise to learn hand and eye coordination. The playing screen is much like iWriteWords, with colorful, large letters encased in bubbles, and a mission to spell easy and familar words – in this case, animals. I was surprised, actually, to see “crane” as one of the animal words. The usuals are there – dog, cat, bunny – but crane, crab, and camel really jumped out at me. I hope to one day see macaw, yak, ocelot.

Changing from the bubbly, colorfully bright palette of iWriteWords, for ABC Maze gdiplus opted for a more subdued, metallic look, with industrial textures, robotic door sounds, and a mysterious glow emanating from an unknown source. To add some kid-appropriate lightheartedness to the app, the main character you child must manipulate, move around, is a wee chick aptly named “Birdie.” So fluffy he appears to be a tiny ball of feather, his beak and wings are the only indicators that a chick is buried somewhere in the white, and his chirruping “cheep” gives away his bird heritage. He, or she, is absolutely adorable whenever you make him jump (tap him) and when a word is completed – Birdie’s eyes smile, upturned, his wings flapping out as much as he can summon, and his beak open with crisp chirps of joy.

Unlike in iWriteWords, where your child must collect the letters for an unknown word, here the word is known, spelled out at the top, and your child must navigate a simple maze to collect all the letters. The letters initially are stagnant in their positions, and remain so unless your child prods them with a finger, encasing them in bubbles and then popping them – if he so desires -, letting the letters drop down in a jumbled mess. From then on the letters move around just like Birdie with every tilt and turn of the iPhone. However, your child can opt not to fiddle around with the letters and just easily collect them in one fell swoop. It’s his choice. Either way, once a word is completed, a child’s voice clearly rings out, enunciating each letter and then the animal word, itself. A precious sketch of the animal appears below, with shooting stars bursting forth in colors of green, blue and pink, and the collective cheers of many recorded children are heard. Learning words is no small feat, and I’d say it calls for a round of celebration.

An excellent app for stimulating the imagination, developing fine motor skills, and developing an association between letters, words and meanings, ABC Maze is an excellent learning tool for young children. With all the complicated apps out there for children, sometimes it’s simple ones, like the ones by gdiplus, that effectively maintain a symmetry between simplicity and a professional aesthetic. And, it’s entertaining for children and adults, alike.

Promotion Codes:

P4W4L96MPXNA

MJ476XFX67KF

YYTWHA7THJ3W

*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

If you have an iPhone, you can play against others over your network, if you have an iPod Touch, you have to be connected to Wi-fi. Or, you have the option for Pass and Play, which allows you to play with one friend on your one device.

I’ve found this app to be great for those who haven’t yet been initiated into the iPhone universe. It’s a classic game that many people have played and are familiar with so dragging the letters to the board is intuitive.

Officially Words with Friends is my lazy Sunday app. My girlfriend and I play it throughout the day as we are sitting at a coffee shop or hanging at the house. Words With Friends hits the mark multiple times.

Successful Features:

• The game
• The ads
• Random opponent

The game is an obvious winner as it’s proven to hold popularity with similar style games. This one is even better because there are more special boxes where you can get triple letter scores, double word scores, etc (I’ll save you and won’t list all of them).

Why would I possibly list the ads as a successful feature? The system is quite smart. After each move you see an ad and can either be linked to the ad’s website, or disregard it and keep playing. They don’t really get annoying and during a game you may see 20 or more ads, but this isn’t disruptive as you just pass the game after your turn while the ad is displayed.

I also really appreciate the Random Opponent feature for when I’m really craving a game and their isn’t anyone within arms reach to help me out with my craving. Now we can enable players everywhere. There’s also a chat feature fi you want to talk to someone.

What I look forward to in an Update:

• Better push notifications when it is your turn.
• Previous games no longer listed on main screen

Sometimes I need to check back again and again to force the app to reload. This can be annoying when I’m playing a random game with someone. If I wait too long, they loose interest and no longer play their turns as often as I’d like.

I’m not sure if the previous games need to be listed in the menu, but it doesn’t really bother me yet. Of course, if I had 100 games, that would bother me. Maybe just use a link to a separate page where previous games are listed. Just a thought.

Bottom Line:

This is a great game! Go for it and you won’t regret it. I play once every few days and if you’re anything like me you’ll find it to be a great way to have a five minute vacation from the world.

We’ve had quite the surge of App Review Requests on our site, and believe me, it’s been no small ordeal siphoning through the pile, playing games, testing out project managers and music apps. . . did I mention playing games? Guess the News by Finger Arts stood out for its cleverness and pill-popping, crack addictive quality (and by that I mean those Trader Joe’s chewable Vitamin C tablets; they’re just so yummy). Basically, the game is like Wheel of Fortune, without the Southern beauty queen in stilettos and sparkly dress, and without, well, the wheel. Instead of a famous phrase, or person, landmark or place, the words you must fill in are actual headlines from reputable news sources, all of them updated within a range of 5-15 minutes – making the game of an endless variety, it seems.

Categories include Top Stories, Nation, International, Business, Entertainment, Sport, Odd Stories, Technology, Science, and Health, all of which grab their headlines from such news sites as CBS, CNN, ABC, The New York Times, Yahoo, PC World, TechCrunch, Wired, ESPN, and more. Even PopSugar, a fabulous, celebrity gossip site whose sister sites YumSugar and GeekSugar I frequent throughout the day, is highlighted in this game for entertainment. And, where else would Odd Stories be referenced than from The Onion?

Select a category and then choose a level of difficulty – easy, medium or hard – and find yourself dazzled with a jumbled pile of letters all to be partitioned and orderly unscrambled to form coherent phrases. Easy mode is easy enough, with every word having at least one letter already in place, but medium and hard mode have whole words missing, with hard even having two words being solved at once. In Classic mode, the game is untimed, but a timer shows you just how long it takes you to solve a word puzzle; otherwise, you may opt for the Timed Mode, where you must race the clock to solve a puzzle as quickly as possible. For competitive anagram junkies, this is a surefire way to improve your mentally tongue-tied state, fire up some synapses, and get your heart racing. To not overwhelm you with five words at once, the game has you solve each word separately, in the order they appear in the sentence. The letters in the word will be highlighted for your ease, outlined in yellow, and using your finger you drag each letter to its assigned space – I recommend jumbling the letters around below before setting them in place, kind of like a practice space. Make sure you see a bullseye before setting a letter down, otherwise it may end up in the wrong spot, making you lose points (this can happen easily). On the left side of the screen is a bar indicating how many points you earn per turn, filling from red to green when you near the top. The longer it takes you to figure out a word, the lower the score multiplier is – wait too long and you may be down to x4 points from x15.

At any point in the game you may choose to “abandon,” should your puzzle-breaking skills not be up to speed and you just throw your hands up in defeat. Before you do this, though, make sure you check out the small blurb at the bottom of the screen describing the article headline. It may just clue you in as to what words would logically appear in the puzzle above. What’s particularly great about Guess The News is that after each round is over, the app gives you a link option to the actual article in question. Fancy that.

Even if you aren’t fond of the news, Guess The News offers a clever way to superficially keep up with whats going on in the world, or, at the very least, what the latest dealings are with sports. Of course, if you are a man, there’s the likely possibly you’re already scrutinizing at least two different sources per day to keep up to speed with sports events. News reader or not, Guess the News is fun and worthy of attention.

As in any beginning typing course, the first line to christen our rescued, borrowed, reinvented typewriters was The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. What’s so interesting about this phrase? It’s a pangram, meaning it contains all the letters of the English alphabet, and its use dates back to the 1800s in publications about shorthand and typing. A January 10, 1903 issue of Pitman’s Phonetic Journal, even referred to the phrase as, “the well known memorized typing line embracing all the letters of the alphabet.” It stands true today, and to bring it even more to the modern age, iPhone app developer Rob Pearson recently created The Quick Brown Fox app as a way to freshen up your typing skills, in a fun and non-serious gaming way.

The app is simple, the thumbnail showing a cute brown fox with sweet googly eyes sitting on his haunches, as if braced to jump over that lazy dog somewhere offscreen. The drawing actually reminds me of the artwork in The Little Red Hen and The Boy Who Cried Wolf, two children’s apps I reviewed earlier this year. The Quick Brown Fox, however, may be used by people of all ages, as it sends you on a frenetic and sometimes irksome journey of typing out this iconic phrase. The goal, obviously, is to type the phrase as quickly as possible, but the app tries to make it interesting by switching up the keyboard on you, ridding any semblance to the usual QWERTY setup.

At first I was confused – isn’t this a typing app to improve your skills on the iPhone? Come to think of it, since so many iPhone users gripe about using their keyboard, even in landscape mode, fumbling around with their fingers, I’d think The Quick Brown Fox would completely capitalize on this. At the same time, the developer was wise enough to realize that typing as an artform is relatively impossible on the tiny iPhone, and everyone’s typing prowess dwindles down to that childish hunt and peck style most of us put by the wayside long ago. So, this app instead capitalizes on the hunt and peck fashion most iPhone users employ, and turns it into a challenging game of spatial awareness, speed, and quickness of the flesh. With each keystroke, the keyboard switches the letters randomly, and the H you had your eye on when tapping the T is now gone from its spot on the lower right to somewhere in the middle.

My first attempt had me at a paltry 1:30:48 for my first try, for a scant 35 letters (*cries in defeat*). On my second try, though, I sped up immensely and found myself at the top of the Global Chart with a time clocking in at 1:03:58, about 9 seconds less than the next runner-up, some girl in Kenya. I’ll try not to think about how many people are actually updating their scores on a game like this (I’ll have to include myself in that mix…).

For awhile, I was intrigued if there was some set pattern, or logic, to the rearranging of the keyboard, and trying to figure this out led to some momentary satisfaction on my part. After realizing it was completely random, however, my interest in challenging the game waned. At least my quickness of speed and finding letters really improved after many tries, a skill I’m sure can be relayed into other avenues, like finding words in Scramble 2. Cute and entertaining the app may be at first, it doesn’t have much longevity, and, honestly, $0.99 just doesn’t seem worth it. So many other apps of that price are full-fledged games, or apps that provide information or resources or directions – and this isn’t even counting the innumerable free apps that accomplish so much more.

If you feel like trying out The Quick Brown Fox for free, our treat, feel free to use the Promo code provided below:

Promotion Codes:

WMMX4XMYY7NF

*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

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?