Best of 2012 Nominations...
Not all games are created equal, and Carcassonne is a great example of how game makers are constantly striving for innovation. For the uninitiated, Carcassonne was originally a German board game created in 2000 where players work together to build a medieval world. This mobile adaptation is everything you could want from a portable Carcassonne, right down to the price!
Something of an unusual, one-shot kind of game, ChessCards combines playing cards with chess rules, creating a puzzle experience that takes some time to wrap your brain around. You start with a massive field of playing cards, each laying face up and waiting to be moved. Your goal is arrange it so that each suit is on its own row. The catch is that cards can only be moved according to their assigned chess piece patterns!
Can't decide if you should play a game of solitaire or a word game? How about "both" so you can stop arguing with yourself and just play? Similar to Word Solitaire in basic concept, Deck of Words delivers exactly what it promises in the title: a deck of lettered cards that must be used to make words. Stack everything just right to spell the most valuable words you can conjure, or else you'll find yourself at the end of the pile with very little to show for your work!
If you always liked playing Pictionary as a board game with friends, now you can doodle away mobile style with Draw Something. A game very similar to Charadium or XSketch, OMGPOP brings players a socially addicting Pictionary-style game to both iOS and Android platforms. The game has even become so popular that it could possibly spawn a TV show!
Golf and cards rarely seem like a fitting pair, but when you see them combined as elegantly as in Fairway Solitaire, you'll start to wonder if other crazy sorts of combinations might work. Like peanuts and pickles! A new mobile port of the previously reviewed PC and Mac release, Fairway Solitaire builds on the game of solitaire using golf terms and rules in a very casual sort of way. Add to that an epic story about gopher revenge, mini-games, an in-game store, and hundreds of courses to play, and you've got a card game that'll keep you busy until the gophers come home. That's a saying, right?
Gear up for some bizarre new words that wouldn't make it past any English teacher's red pen with Xether Labs's free iOS word puzzle! The concept and gameplay is simple... figure out the clues and fill in the blanks to reveal the strange new word you get by combining the two solutions. Best enjoyed passed back and forth on the couch with a witty and weird friend, it's the sort of breezy, simple, silly game mobile devices seem perfectly designed for to help you enjoy yourself whenever you have a spare moment.
Billed as a crossword game with a twist, KRIZL from Rekim is a mobile puzzle game that challenges your word skills along with spatial recognition. There are no riddles to solve or questions to answer, so instead of scratching your head over obscure pop culture references, you'll spend your time rotating grid pieces so that every stream of letters spells a complete word. It's a great way to make crossword puzzles more casual!
Behold, a delicious platter of letters. They're all yours to take... but you must guard them from your thieving opponent! Letterpress is a multiplayer word game with a cool strategic twist where making words is only half the battle; you've got to fight to keep your letters. It's a quick pick-up-and-put-down game perfect for matches with friends on Game Center. That is, if you like dominating your friends with your vocabulary.
What a world we live in, where mankind can walk on the moon, salad can be purchased in cups, and falling block puzzles can be fused with word games. If you're ready for your brain to have a little run through the multitasking wringer, Puzzlejuice is without a doubt the best way to hurt your synapses. With a little Tetris-like block arranging and a little Spelltower-style word building, you, too, can drive yourself mad with delight!
QatQi is like Scrabble with fewer letters and a much more pressing size constraint. The unique word puzzle game from ZWorkBench gives you a small handful of letters, each with its own value, and sets you in front of a small board and tells you "Go forth! Spell!" The catch is you must use all of the letters in order to pass the stage (some children don't have the luxury of wasting letters, you know), forcing frequent use of the undo button when you can't seem to get it just right. If you're both lucky and possess an unusually lush vocabulary, you might just find yourself on QatQi's high score board!
Well, do ya? Because if you don't, you might as well just give up now, this game is too much for you. In fact, give up writing and talking altogether. Why bother, right? Kinda hard not to accept a challenge as brazen as the one brought forth in the title of So You Think You Know Words. Fortunately, the mobile word game doesn't skimp in the content department, allowing you to spend hours on end proving that you do, indeed, know words.
Graduation time at Spellwood Academy! Biggles the bespectacled bunny wizard is ready for finals, but unlike most school exams, these happen to be quite entertaining. Spellwood from Three Rings (creator of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates) drops you in a cheery fantasy world of one-on-one word battles, allowing you to face off against opponents in turn-based tile combat. Think of it as Scrabble meets Puzzle Quest with wands and anthropomorphic animals and you'll have a good idea what to expect!
e slow paced but challenging iOS title from Highline Games has a sharp focus that sticks firmly to word crafting. No weirdo bonus mini-games, clowns, hidden objects or other gimmicks, just long levels of wrapping your brain around a grid of letters. Oh, and just so you know, W.E.L.D.E.R. stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. Aren't you glad you were curious?!
One area where organic intelligence beats artificial intelligence every time is finding abstract relationships between two or more things. That, and explaining exactly why Desperate Housewives is still on the air (although that still baffles most human brains). Word to Word plays on our noggin's ability to associate conceptual ideas by presenting you with two lists of words. Your job is to pair them up, tapping a word on the left and matching it to a word on the right. You can't move on until everything is correctly paired up, so you have to think both inside the box and outside of it at the same time!
Wordsplosion is a hip, stylish word game that's very similar to the classic board game Mastermind as well as the more recent Wordspector. Your goal is to guess a series of five letter words using a single starting clue. You're given the first letter for free, but in order to figure out the rest, you'll need a combination of skill, luck, trial and error, and maybe a nice dictionary!
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