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Category: Word games
Developer: 99games Online Pvt. Ltd.
Requirements: iPhone 2.0 software
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch
File Size: 11.1MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Price: $1.99
Age Rating: 4+

I totally wish my last name was Wordsworth. It’s not that I have anything against Hiner, but with a name like that, you’re pretty much bound to a life of servitude. With a last name like Wordsworth, I could be a detective or a scholar or a writer or anything smarter and British-er than I currently am.

Kirk Wordsworth III. Awesome.

Since that isn’t going to happen, however, I’ll have to content myself with playing WordsWorth for the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a word game from 99games that’s well suited for the iPhone’s touch screen, and better suited for those who savor “The Joy of Lex.” The game presents you with a grid of tiles, each containing a letter. The grid ranges from 4x4 to 7x7, depending upon your preference. It’s your job to link the letter tiles to form words. You can’t move the tiles, though, and the letters of the word must be touching each other in the order in which the word is spelled. The longer the word and the more rare the letters in the word, the more points you get. It’s a lot like Scrabble in that way, only you’re forced to find words instead of create them.

You may think you have a large vocabulary, and you probably do, but tapping it while staring at a jumbled mess of letters isn’t always so easy. Although you can adjust the minimum number of letters in a word, I suggest you keep it at the default of three. You can go as high as five, but you’re going to need words such as “low” and “pod” in order to stay alive.

As you select your letters, they’re typed out at the top of the screen. When a word is spelled, a point value is assigned. I ended up using this to cheat—randomly hitting letters that could spell words and waiting until a point value was assigned. I didn’t have a high success rate with this, but it did help me out in a couple instances, and taught me a few new words, too.

If you’re stuck for words at any point, you can shake your phone for a new set of letters, although at a penalty. Doing this will give you red timed tiles, which contain not only a letter, but also a timer of its own. If you don’t use these letters before their time expires, the game is over, and it’s back to level one for you.

WordsWorth comes with a decent number of features, and more are on the way. Aside from the aforementioned word and grid size settings, you can select to shut off the music (which I recommend, because it’s kind of annoying and has a badly linked loop). Currently, shutting off the music also kills the sound effects, but a fix has been submitted to Apple that will prevent this from happening. The fix also contains new background music, and will allow you to listen to your own music while playing the game. In addition, you’ll be able to determine the timer speed and the number of times per level you can shake to reset the tiles.

Another setting that’ll please the linguists out there is the ability to determine the database used for the acceptable word list. You can choose TWL (the official word list for tournament Scrabble in the U.S., Canada, Thailand and Israel), Sowpods (the official word list for tournament Scrabble in all other English speaking countries) or Enable (the most thoroughly researched and maintained word list for word game usage). I tried them all, and found I apparently know no words composed of more than four letters in any of them.

WordsWorth is a game the Scrabble and Boggle crowds will love. It’s missing multiplayer capabilities, but will keep you entertained for solitary gaming sessions. The 1.1 update will rid the game of a few annoyances once Apple gets around to approving it, but you don’t need to wait for that to download it; it’s good enough as is. However, if you want to try out the basic functionality before buying, WordsWorth Lite is available for free. It’s limited to 5 levels, whereas the full version has 20, but is otherwise comparable.

If you’re the target audience for WordsWorth (and you know who you are), the game delivers. It’s not going to create any word game converts, but it may convince many of us to change our last name to Wordsworth, buy a pipe and a smoking jacket, and sit around all day discussing stocks and Wodehouse. Ah, the life for me!