iPhone App Review - Riddle me this, Wurdle me that

What it is?

Wurdle, in a nutshell, is a Scrabble like game that is word search in reverse. You work only with the tiles/letters you start with, which can be 16, 25, 36, and you form as many words as you can by connecting on a grid adjacent letters as quickly as you can. You get more points for longer words. Dupes don't count. It uses the official Scrabble library.

The name, Wurdle, is a good hint at what it is. It sounds like muddle - you're dealing with a random letters, letter salad. It also sounds like riddle - you're basically doing a mass, randomish decryption.

Playing Wurdle

I am no Scrabble expert and feel especially so after having read a New Yorker piece on the annual Scrabble tournament, but I have found some ways to score better. I mostly play in the 5x5 grid for three minutes mode. Suffixes like "s", "er", "ed" lets you double up on words that can be pluralized or tensed. "S" in the right place is like a suffix two-fer. Letter groupings like "est", "ing", "oo", ee" usually are chock full of opportunities. Certain patterns come up frequently: a, e, t together in a triangle gives you: tea, eat, tae, eta, ate.

Those are small potatoes though - the way to score is to find all the long words just like you would with Scrabble, but the more exotic letters like "Z" don't give you higher scores. However, I really don't have an simple method for finding many lettered words. I take it that that is one of the innate abilities that identify the really good players but that's something I'm working on. I have a feeling it's got more to do with your visual than language ability.

Sometimes random swipes and guesses work, but those words, you don't use everyday. There ought to be a Scrabble vernacular dictionary. Who the heck uses "dele" in every day language. I'll definitely check around for how to get better at Scrabble books. Note, you cannot multitask and play this game effectively, at least I can't. Maybe walking, but not with a TV.

A requirement for Wurdle should be an accompanying dictionary. I like the Oxford dictionary, but that can be expensive. Wordbook is cheaper, but alot of the words in Wurdle aren't in Wordbook. Nonetheless, you learn alot but looking up words you missed. This is where it would be nice if the iPhone allowed you to multitask apps. You can't switch from Wurdle to a dictionary app without losing your completed game, thus all the words you missed.

Should I buy it?

I am a book person, love crosswords and acrostics, so it follows that I love this game, but it *should* appeal to non wordies alike. I've been playing it for a several weeks now. Given the iPhone's ability, it's not the most cutting edge game - it doesn't use the accelerometer, lacks networking features and game features, and is very basic compared to Spore or X-Plane, but the touch screen is made for this game. Clicking on letters would make`Wurdle alot less playable.

Some of the iTunes reviewers dismissed Wurdle. I wonder if any of them took a look at the high scores. I would suspect most people, after a couple of tries, score around 2,000, 3,000. The high score is somewhere on the order of 25,000. That is just sick. I'm currently at around 5,000. Most of the fun in the game is aspiring to that high score and I don't think those reviewers really gave the game a chance, or are just not word people. Gen Y and onwards is the video, connected generation after all.

Very minor not so goods

There are some annoyances. One is not with Wurdle, but with the Scrabble dictionary. Many common French, Spanish words are not counted. Common English words like "Asia" aren't accepted.

Related to the game itself, when you pause a game and resume, the timer accelerates the last 5 seconds and you can't review the word list. Sometimes it takes longer for a connected word to register. If you're on a subway or bus or some shaky ground, you might unwittingly reset your grid, especially annoying if you are have a grid chock full of words. I tried all the acceleromter sensitivity settings, but I still get resets. Otherwise, the interface is easy to use and very elegant.

Suggestions

I would add the ability to save a completed game, to capture all the words you found and all the possible words in a grid, so you can do a review. You can do this yourself by a bunch a screen captures, but it's awkward.

I would also add an option to turn the timer off and so you could make a concerted effort to find all the possible words in a grid.

That way, you can really make inroads to that 25,000.