Words With Friends

March 14, 2012

If Jessica is a "Brit Lit" junkie, I will confess to being a Words With Friends junkie. I loved playing Scrabble years ago, so when a friend on Facebook invited me to play Words With Friends, I jumped right in—having no idea that I was about to get obsessed with a new toy.  

Words With Friends is an online game created by the company Zynga, which boasts over 10 million users. I believe it based on how easy and accessible it is to play, especially if you have a smartphone. The board is laid out like a Scrabble board with double letter tiles, double words, triples, etc. In some ways, it’s even more fun to play than a regular Scrabble game because you don’t feel pressure to make your move in any sort of time limit. Games can be played as quickly or as slowly as the two people playing want to pace them out. You can even have up to twenty games going at once. (I have four going right now, which is about as much as I can keep up with.) 

Playing is a lot of fun, and one could even argue that it helps you build your vocabulary. I like to rearrange my seven tiles and see if there’s any way I can play them all at once—which earns you 35 bonus points. (I’ve only done it once, with the word "digitate.") Check out a Scrabble dictionary from the library to find those obscure words, like qi, qat, fez, and xu. The easiest way to play is probably on Facebook, but if you’re not on Facebook you can still play by going to the Zynga.com website.

Enjoy! But be forewarned…this game can be so addicting. You might not want to turn it off when you board a plane. You don’t want to get booted off, like Alec Baldwin did!

Lori G.
Colbern Road Branch