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In-Depth Review
wurdle
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 at 11:20 AM - by Bob LeVitus
wurdle is a reasonably-priced ($1.99), totally addicting, fast, fun word game in the tradition of Boggle with a touch of Scrabble. (And yes, wurdle is indeed spelled with a lower case "w.")
At the start of a game a random grid of letter tiles appears looking something like this:
A red trail appears as you drag your finger across the letter tiles to spell words and the letters you've dragged through appear below the grid, like this:
When you've spelled a word correctly a pleasant tone lets you know it (assuming you have sound effects enabled) and when you lift your finger the number of points awarded for the word (120 in the picture above) floats across the screen and the points are added to your score (0 in the picture above). The longer the word, the more points it's worth. When there are five seconds remaining, a countdown appears over the tiles as shown here:
And that's about it. Drag your finger and keep making words until time runs out.
I like that the game can be customized to your liking. For example, you can play on a 4 by 4, 5 by 5, 6 by 6, 7 by 7, or 8 by 8 grid. And you can select a game length of 1, 2, 3, 5, or unlimited minutes and minimum word length of 3, 4, or 5 letters. Finally, you can easily customize the look of both the tiles and the wallpaper as you can see in the figures above.
For what it's worth, I like playing on a 5 by 5 or 6 by 6 grid because my fat fingers have trouble tapping the smaller 7 by 7 or 8 by 8 tiles. And I find 2 minutes plenty long enough for me. Your mileage may vary which is why it's so nice to have options.
My only complaint about this game, and it's a little one, is that I think you should receive more points when you use "harder" letters such as Q, Z, and X in a word, but you don't.
A couple more things:
My wife likes it a lot, too, possibly even more than I do.
Even after a couple of weeks I still suck. My high score for a 2 minute game is 2,320, but according to the Semi Secret Software Web site, the highest recorded score for a 2 minute game is a whopping 36,100.
The Bottom Line
wurdle is a challenging, addicting, easily customized word puzzle game. If you like words you'll almost certainly like this game as much as I do. And seeing how I can't stop playing it, that's a lot.
Just The Facts
Pros:
Quick games, very addictive, lots of options.
Cons:
"Harder" letters don't score more points.
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