The Casual Gamer by Jennifer Sandberg

Magic Words (January 4, 2006)

Wow! I can't believe how many word-based games there are out there. I ran into Word Jong while doing my Mah Jong article and I have spent many evenings playing Dungeon Scroll with my husband, so I expected to find a few, but what I found was overwhelming. There was no way to play all of them, but I feel like I got a good sampling of what is out there and found a few favorites.

The great thing about word games is that you don't feel as guilty playing them (we all have a million important things on our to-do lists) as you might with other less-educational selections. The "educational" label isn't just conscience salving either, you really can learn a thing or two from many of these games.

The game that really found its way into my heart is Thomas and the Magical Words. It's a kid game, but the truth is that I am often jealous of the time my daughter gets to spend with Thomas on his adventure. The game itself is scrabble-based and easy to pick up. The basic story is that you have to make words to form a path through the book that Thomas, a little magician, is trapped in and rescue some pets along the way. There are lots of "wild" tiles which make it easier for beginning spellers, but I like to use them to form incredibly long words to pump up my score. My favorite feature is the in-game dictionary which lets you check out the meaning of the word you just spelled. The letter tiles change color once you have formed a word so you can brush up on your vocabulary and maybe even learn a few new words (I did, and I was an English minor). To make things even better, the game comes attractively packaged with bright colors and nice graphics. If you have kids, you should pick up this game (and please share it with them). If you don't have children, check it out anyway.

Another of my favorites is also scrabble-based. It's not that I am even a huge fan of scrabble, I guess it just makes for some great games. This one is a kind of scrabble meets RPG. In Dungeon Scroll you have to blast away various monsters by creating words from a set of letter tiles. The better your word, the more powerful the blast will be. It's a race against time and some of the baddies are difficult to beat, but there are some power-ups that can be real lifesavers in a moment of crisis. It's a pretty simple game to play, but it's fast-paced and fun. My husband and I have spent many hours with this game, two heads, after all, are better than one, and it's about the only time that I get to look over his shoulder.

I found a lot of games in the word search category. For those of you who loved Big Kahuna Reef, there is now a wordy version called.... Big Kahuna Word. There is probably a word search out there for everyone. The most memorable word search game for me was Word Craft. I find that a bit strange because it is a very boy-looking game. Basically, you use metal tiles to form words. The tiles need to stay warm and the longer a tile is left unused the colder it gets and the more difficult it becomes to use in a word. This is a game that keeps you on your toes because every second you spend creating one word, the other tiles are getting colder. Maybe I like it because it is a metaphor for my life as a mother—every second I spend fixing one problem is a second my kids spend creating another and so we move from one crisis to the next. The great thing is that in Word Craft you can hone your crisis-management skills and no one gets hurt :).

I would call Fairy Words a build-your-own word find. Haven't you ever thought, "Oh, if there was just an "n" right there I could make the coolest word!?" Well now you can. You start out with a single word and you can add to the grid any one letter from the alphabet for each word that you spell. The thing is, you get bonus points for each square left blank at the end of the round so you have to choose your letters carefully and place them in the most advantageous places to make the most words with the fewest letters possible. The setting is fantasy fairy (not girlie fairy) and the mood is slow and mellow. It's an interesting game and a nice change from all those times when you almost have all the letters you need to make a really great word.

I tried out a couple of versions of hangman, each of which had some cool features. Weave Words has a blue color scheme and understated sound effects which I preferred to the reds and casino sounds of FlipWords, though FlipWords did have catchier background music. The games are similar, but the approach is a bit different in each.
Your hangman guesses are taken from the letters of the words that you find in the wordsearch. Weave Words lets you select from your word the letter you want to guess gives you 6 chances to guess incorrectly. FlipWords uses the first letter of the word you formed as your hangman guess which is a little more restrictive, but they start you out with 20 turns and you can earn extra turns in both games. The Weave Words approach seems to be a tad more difficult, but I'm not sure which I prefer. The real clincher for me is in the word categories. They both let you create and share your own phrases, though this is much easier to do in FlipWords, but Weave Words also allows you to customize your game to use only the categories that you select. Today I deselected everything but cat breeds. You can change your selections every day to suit your moods and you never have to waste time guessing in a category that doesn't interest you in the least, so move over Military Ranks and bring on Fairy Tales and enjoy some time with a new old classic.

In the find-every-possible-word-from-the-letters-that-you-are-given category we find Jig Words. Similar to Jig Jag (though notably by a different game company) you have a picture in the background that gets uncovered as you progress through the game. Its a lot of fun when you are up to the challenge of squeezing every word out of the set of letters, though if you're not quite up to finding all of them, passing the level only requires you to find enough words to complete the jigsaw puzzle. It is also fun to compete online against ghosts (it's not real-time, but there is always someone "online" to play with).

Just for fun I tried out Reader's Digest Super Word Power. It's like the magazine version, but with the instant gratification of a computer game. It also includes a word scramble, but I prefer the original word-with-multiple-choice-definitions game. You also get a bonus round of synonym matching. It's a great exercise for anyone who wants to sound articulate. At any rate, you wouldn't ever be considered a macroverbumsciolist!*

*nonce word 1) a person who is ignorant of large words 2) a person who pretends to know a word, then secretly refers to a dictionary

There is something in the vast array of word games to suit almost any taste, and since they are educational, they are good for lots of guilt-free fun!

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This was just a small sampling of the great word games that I looked at when preparing to write this article. A categorized list of games I played is below:

Scrabble games:
Thomas and the Magical Words
Dungeon Scroll

Word Search:
Beesley's Buzz Words
ABC Island
Word Craft
Fairy Words
Puzzle Word
Big Kahuna Word
Bonnie's Bookstore

Find all words:
Text twist
Jig Words

Hangman:
FlipWords
Weave Words

Puzzles:
Word Harmony
Word blitz (tetris-like)

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By: Jennifer Sandberg
Posted: Tuesday January 03, 2006