Words with Friends

For anyone who knows me, they know how much I despise social networking.  If you want to talk to me, pick up a phone or open your email and send me a note.  And likewise, if I want to talk to you I’ll do the same.  I don’t need stalking my every move, nor do I feel such a high level of self-importance that I think I need to post my everything for the world to see.  That being said, I have a new addiction and it grew out of the social networking site Facebook.  It’s a little game called Words with Friends by Zynga.

Words with Friends

You may have already heard about this game, it’s the game that got Alec Baldwin booted off an airplane when he refused to turn his phone off.  Anyway, even after all the buzz surrounding that incident I wasn’t remotely interested as I don’t really use my smart phone for playing games.  Then one day it happened.  I’m sitting in the lunchroom at work and one of my co-workers is obsessively checking her phone.  In my normal sarcastic way I questioned her on what could be so important on her phone that she was being so rude to a table of people eating with her.  She sarcastically replied, “It’s Words with Friends dummy.”  I naturally scoffed but after she explained the context of the game I secretly wanted to play it.  And as they say, the rest was history.

Make no mistake about it, Words with Friends is just Scrabble, but a million times cooler.  (In fact it’s a million times better than the ACTUAL Scrabble app made for the Android platform.)  The big selling point to me was that a game can go as fast as two people want to play it (hours) or as slow as two people want to play it (weeks).  Basically you take your move whenever you have a chance…in between meetings, at lunchtime, at home on the couch or right before bed.  Each player gets to dictate how much time they want to invest into the game.  Another big selling point for me is that it’s not some mindless game.  It actually requires some intelligence and strategy.  Finally, the last thing I really like about this game is that it has a built-in “chat” feature to be able to send messages back and forth while playing…true social gaming.  Nice!

That’s not to say the game is perfect.  For example if you’re playing a game where both parties are actively playing it doesn’t auto-update that it’s you move except for every 5 minutes (or manually checking in over and over).  Also, it seems like the game gives out a lot of vowels (more times than not I have 6 out of 7 letters being vowels)…but that’s just probably just my perception and not an actual flaw of the game.

Bottom line–try the game.  In fact, look me up my username is McLinker.  Let me put it this way…if I actually took the time to get off my lazy butt and write this review about a GAME, it must be good.  Hit the link below for direct access to the game.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.zynga.words&hl=en