Wordament is a free word game for Windows Phone 7 published by Microsoft studios. The two best words in that previous sentence are “free” and Microsoft Studios which adds up to free achievements. I do love achievements! Even better is Wordament itself.
Playtime!
The goal of the game is like most other word games; generate the highest score with the longest word and/or as many words as you can find. The board is made up of a square of 16 letter tiles each with their own points allocated to them. You drag your finger from one tile to the next neighboring tile linking letters to make words. You can drag forwards, backwards and diagonally throughout the same word just so long as at least the corners of the tiles touch. Each word you build is based on the cumulative points of each of the letters so generally speaking the longer the word the better the score. As in other word games, there are more points for the uncommon letters such as Q, U and V. Every now and then it will throw a double letter tile at you to mix things up. These are also worth more points. You must remember that regardless of the direction you are dragging to create your word the double letters only ever read from left to right.
If you find yourself stuck, you can rotate the board to get a fresh perspective on the tiles. They don’t shake or mix themselves up which left me a disappointed when and all it did was…well… rotate. Honestly, I was mainly disappointed in myself for thinking it would do something other than what it clearly alluded to.
After completing my first game I realized the reason for not mixing the letters. Each board that generates has a large set of predetermined common and uncommon words. Adding to those words are special “diagram” words that are either lengthier or related to an unknown theme. Unlock one of the words in the theme and you receive a notification telling you how many theme words you have left to find as well as the theme itself. Unlocking theme or lengthier words earns you star points. Basically, this means the words are worth more so they can be very helpful to your score.
After two very quick minutes your time is up and you have roughly 40 seconds to relax between rounds. Wordament spends the first 15 seconds congratulating you on all the words you found as well as mocking you with all the words you missed. If that little kick in the arse wasn’t enough it flips to the leaderboards. The leaderboards list the top 15 or so players in the world as well as 40 or 50 around your overall ranking. In my case that was a long way down!
Friends or Enemies?
Even as bad as I am, what I really dug was the concept of “frenemies” Wordament is pushing. You can tap the name of any player you see on the leaderboard and they become your frenemy. Play the same board as they do and you can see if you beat their score or not. It is frustrating when you don’t, especially if you jumped into the middle of a game, but it feels pretty sweet when you top their score!
Finally
There are three issues that I found annoying to varying degrees. The game is free so there is a little ad scrolling at the bottom the whole time you’re playing but it’s free achievements so I can put up with that. The game also doesn’t pause if you have to exit out to take a phone call, separate screaming children or make a phone call because of the screaming children. It is always on 24x7 happily playing along in the background. This doesn't use the phones battery as it is playing off of the Wordament servers. However, when you come back to it you find a board almost over or one that you managed to get 0% on. That was always a little disheartening. The part my family and I found most annoying was that as bad as I am I could not put it down. Burning supper, playing Wordament, kids in a cold bath. playing Wordament, dogs haven’t been fed today, playing Wordament, wife telling me to come to bed, playing Wordament. All in all, this is an almost perfect pick up and play mobile game. With free achievements it is must have on your Windows phone.This one is a no-brainer. You should buy the game now, even if you have to step on your dog or run over your kids to get it. It’s totally worth the full price and you would get a lot of replay out of it.
Wordament (TM) is a trademark of You vs. the Internet, LLC. 2011
