Last month I reviewed an iPhone game called Diamenty, a free "match three jewels in a row" game I called, "addictive, fun, and free." Well I have good news and bad news. First the bad: Diamenty is no longer available. If you visit its address with your iPhone you'll find this:

(Just between us chickens, I suspect that PopCap Games lawyers delivered this Great News to Arkadiusz but who knows...) Anyway, in my review of Diamenty, I said, "if you've ever played Bejeweled (Mac & PC) you know exactly how Diamenty works," which basically meant that Diamenty was a note-for-note rip-off of PopCap Games' Bejeweled.

As you've probably guessed, the good news is that there is now an official version of Bejeweled for the iPhone from PopCap Games. Better still, it's prettier than Diamenty (see below), more fun to play, and absolutely free (with no advertising, either).

Gameplay is exactly the same as with Diamenty--your goal is to arrange three or more matching gems in a line either horizontally or vertically. To arrange the gems, you tap one, then tap any adjacent gem to swap their places and form a line of three or more matching gems. When you make a line of three or more gems, those gems disappear and all the gems above them slide downward to fill the holes. You receive points for each gem that disappears and the green thermometer fills up accordingly, New gems fall onto the board from the top to replace the ones that have disappeared. The more lines of three or more gems you make, the higher your score. When the green thermometer fills all the way up you get a bonus. The game ends when no more lines of three or more matching gems can be created.

I created some screen shots to show how the game works for my Diamenty review. I'd have done the same for Bejeweled but unlike Diamenty you can't play the iPhone version of Bejeweled in Safari (or FireFox, or any other Mac browser for that matter). So, if you'd like to see some illustrations of how the game works, click here. (While you're there, check out how much uglier the gems in Diamenty were compared to the gems in Bejeweled...)

Bejeweled plays even better than Diamenty on my iPhone but I have the same minor gripes I had about Diamenty. First, the gems are a bit small and my fingers are not, so I find myself missing the gem I was aiming for more often than I'd like. Second, unlike some versions of Bejeweled (see the next paragraph), this version doesn't offer a timer. That's a mixed blessing. It takes the pressure off and lets you switch to another task on your phone without ending your game. But the pressure and the timer are part of what makes other versions so addicting. So I wish there were an option for timed play. Finally, playing Bejeweled seems to run down my iPhone battery somewhat faster than many other activities. That's probably not Bejeweled's fault but I thought it was worth mentioning.

One last thing: While the iPhone version of Bejeweled doesn't work in Safari or other Web browsers, PopCap Games does offer a free online version of Bejeweled that seems to work with most browsers and addresses one of my gripes--unlike the iPhone version it does offer an optional timed mode.

You can find that version here.

The Bottom Line

It's a great game--fun, addictive, and free. It's superb when you have a few free minutes to kill--the drive through line at the bank or MacDonalds, in line for a movie, etc. It's a near-perfect waste of time, which I consider high praise for a game.