Review: Scrabble

Overview With its smooth graphics, sounds and even some accelerometer usage, this app is a good pocket pastime for casual Scrabble players, or for those new to the game. For experienced veterans and more serious players, it’s a catastrophe.

Gameplay From the game’s opening animation, it’s clear that Scrabble aims to be a flashy and visually appealing pocket version of the tabletop classic. The sleek graphics continue into the actual game, which is played by tapping and dragging tiles into position on the familiar game board (although the colors of the board’s bonus squares are unconventional and have drawn the ire of Scrabble nerds nationwide). There are exchange and shuffle options, as well as a “Best Word” feature, which allows the computer to suggest the best possible word that you could play at that time (as a Scrabble enthusiast, I think this is quite possibly the lamest thing that I’ve seen since Legally Blonde 2. Yes, I saw it).

There are platforms for playing against a computer or up to four opponents in a “Pass ‘n Play” mode, which does not reveal the next player’s tiles until after he selects an “OK” button to start his next turn.

Although there have been extensive complaints about the game’s stability and its long relaunching time, these seem to have been corrected in the latest update. It didn’t crash once on my watch and the loading times didn’t seem to be a problem. Review I am a Scrabble fanatic, which isn’t to say that I’m a great player, but I enjoy the game’s pure form (clunky boards, tiles and all) and I have to say, there were so many basic components missing from this app that it made Facebook’s free Scrabulous game (now Wordscraper) seem like a subscription service. Let’s set aside the fact that the “Best Word” option drains my lifeblood, or that you can’t see potential point values of words before they are actually played. These are new technology related issues for this classic game that can and hopefully will be adjusted. But what about word challenges?! Let me explain: In normal Scrabble, if you play a word and an opponent recognizes that it’s not a real word, they must challenge it and if it is proven wrong, you lose the word and your turn (if you’re right, the challenger loses his turn). This is a fun element that adds a dimension to the game, but if all of the words are checked by a computer before they are played, then I’ll know that all of my words will always be acceptable and I could even continuously rearrange letters into words that I don’t really know and could eventually come up with a combination that is accepted and gets me points. Somehow I’m rewarded for being an illiterate, tile-tossing fool, whereas in the real game I would have had to do a little more thinking. The saddest part is that even Scrabulous, the aforementioned free online rip-off, offers an optional “challenge” mode. But let’s say you’re not a serious Scrabble player and these things don’t bother you. Well, I’ve got a whole list of other things that will. Somehow this app, which makes use of the accelerometer for tile shuffling purposes, neglects to include any kind of wireless multiplayer mode. For being an app on this iPhone platform that has made such waves for its ability to utilize user locations to connect people and create new and interesting activity, this game fails to make use of any of these functions and offers only its “Pass ‘n Play” mode. On top of the missing “challenge” mode, there are no options for turning off the “Best Word” function. There is also no way to view the definition of words played or, as mentioned above, to get a calculation for a potential word’s value. And what if you want to pause a game against the computer and start a new game against a friend? Not possible. Scrabble will abandon the old game and only save one game at a time. Summary It’s pretty and it's smooth, but this is no game for experienced Scrabble veterans. Newbies may appreciate it, but even for recent addicts from the scrabulous generation, there are just too many missing components for this version of Scrabble to be considered good.

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