Addicted to Wordbrain

wordbrainAs I sit, and sit, and sit with my leg raised after a knee operation I’ve become addicted to Wordbrain. It’s a deceptively simple game: There’s a grid of letters and you need to find the words scrambled within the grid. Sometimes finding them in the right order is required because finding one word causes the letters above to fall towards the bottom of the screen.

While all that might sound straightforward, the game gets pretty challenging as you progress through the levels. I’m only about halfway through and already some of the levels are taking an age to solve.And I haven’t got to the really big grids yet. The thing that does make it easier is that the words are generally straightforward ones; in fact I’ve often found myself stuck just because I’m over-complicating the solution.

There are hints available and unless you’re more wordy than me they’re necessary. That’s really my only criticism of the game: You can buy hints. So, you get a starter pack of hints when you download the free game, then each level successfully completed gives you a few more. You get more still if you tell your social media world that you’re playing – a clever ploy that demonstrably works as I found the game after Adam Spencer Tweeted about it. But you get more still by buying hint packs. That makes the rating on each level that says how many other people have completed it feel a little less solid than might otherwise be the case – have they completed it with lots of hints or by dint of brain-sweat? I don’t begrudge the game’s authors making some money out of it, not at all, but it’s always a fine line when the revenue stream changes the game dynamic. Of course, I’d like to say that it’s really all about me against the game, but it’s hard not to judge the difficulty against how many others have managed a level.

I can heartily recommend Wordbrain if you like word puzzles. It always feels better to have an addiction shared, doesn’t it?

[appstore id=”708600202″ style=”custombox3″]

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.