Growing up I remember our Saturday night Scrabble games. We would all gather around the table after dinner, get out some dessert and pull out the board. After some yelling, a little not so gentle encouragement to play just a little faster and a good time we would head to bed. We’re all grown now, don’t live close and when we’re together we are watching our kids run around. We don’t have the time to play a full game of Scrabble.
Words With Friends changed that. Everyone in my family has an iPhone, iPoud Touch or iPad. Words With Friends is the app that lets us get our Scrabble fix, without the yelling and screaming. Ok, maybe we yell and scream a bit, but it’s not face to face so the others can’t hear me. To start you need to sign up for an account which takes seconds. Once you and the person you want to play are registered you are ready to start. As soon as you open the game you’ll see the familiar Scrabble board and tiles. It’s a simple matter of dragging and dropping the letters to spell your word. Click submit, it adds up the points for you and it’s your opponents turn. Sorry folks, no fudging the numbers in this Scrabble game. Your opponent can open the app, see that you moved and take their turn.
The beauty is you can play at your own speed. The game lists your current games and quickly shows if it is your turn or your opponents turn. I currently have games going with 4 different family members and we each play 2-3 words a day. We play a little after dinner, before bed, when the kids go down for a nap, whenever you have a minute to put down a word. When someone wins a message pops up asking if you want to rematch. We learned the hard way that if both people choose a rematch you have two games going. We decided the winner does the rematch to keep us from going crazy. There is a chat area in the game so you can still get that trash talking in. Scrabble just wouldn’t be the same without it.
The one thing I don’t like is you can only play a one-on-one game. You can have multiple games going and it does a great job of letting you know what’s going on, but I’d love to have a game with four or five of my friends all at once. Maybe a future version will have this? It’s a great app for scrabble lovers, let’s you play the game at your own speed on-line so distance doesn’t matter. And if you like Hangman the same makers have it as an app as well.