Dictionary.com Word Games

Word Kingdom: In this game, you earn supplies for your kingdom by spelling out words using tiles representing each item: food, wood, stone, and gold. At each level you are given certain tasks to complete. At first it starts out easy as your first objectives are just to gather enough items to build a level one marketplace, level one blacksmith, and a level one archery, stable, barrack, or magic guild. Then you have enemies to worry about attacking or defending against. If you're defeated you have to start the level over again. These enemies get tougher as you go along and while they're attacking you have to keep spelling out words to replenish your supplies in order to have soldiers defending your castle. This gets very annoying as most of the tiles will not be the ones you need (food, gold, or magic if you've decided to go with a magic guild). You can't pause the action to stop and replenish items or trade your unwanted quantities of stone for any of the other supplies at your marketplace. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth it since a good percentage of the time my troops will march right past an oncoming attacker and wander off-screen never to be seen again! They use up so much of my resources they'd better damn well be doing their job!

Ad Lib: This game is designed a lot like Tetris, only with letters instead of groups of four blocks (since most of the words I'm able to hash together on the quick have four letters, Tetris is a pretty accurate comparison). The more words you spell or the more of the same letter you group together, the more rows you eliminate. One way this is not like Tetris is the storyline they give you. In the beginning, you see two siblings walking into a room and picking up a supposedly magic book that turns one of them into an owl. You're playing as the other sibling and you have to spell out words to pass all the levels to turn your sibling back to normal. If this were one continuous game like Tetris, I think I'd enjoy it a little better because just when I'm getting into the zone, I get enough points to pass and the level ends abruptly. Plus, every so often little messages will pop up warning you about the different kinds of blocks that will appear: unmovable letters, exploding letters, freezing letters, and extra points letters. As usual, if you can't spell any words to eliminate enough rows, the game is over once the top row reaches the top of the screen. After a certain number of levels, the sibling is returned to normal. You'd think you've won and the game would be over, but not so. After the screen announcing his return to humanity, the game still continues until all the letters reach the top of the screen. There are still levels to pass, however, but I haven't been through enough of them since the game does get harder from here. I do enjoy this game - in fact, I think I might be addicted to it. It's a great game to pass the time with because it's way more exciting than the daily crossword.

Clockwords: I have mixed feelings about this one. It's a game wherein you have to spell out as many words as you can as fast as you can to kill nano-spiders trying to steal research papers from you. After level one, it gets more complicated. You have a certain number of letters in a chamber to fuss with that have certain strength levels. These will be used during the game and are more effective than words you spell with letters that aren't in the tank. There are special letters you can get that are even stronger, but you'd have to sign up for a special newsletter in order to get them, and that's just not worth it. Don't forget to save your progress though, because if you fail a round you don't get acknowledged for the rounds you did clear. I do not recommend this game unless you are really bored or really committed to it, and I didn't notice that many people having played it either judging by the scoreboard (unless they were like me and didn't save their progress either). But if you're that bored, you're probably better off just throwing Scrabble tiles at that spider in the corner of your room.

As an aside, I'm just going to say that I'm not going to defend the Irate Gamer, but I don't really see what the big deal is. People should just support the reviewers they like and leave the ones they don't to do their thing. It's worse than getting involved in a shipping war. "Good lord what do all these buttons do?" Oh Ronny...