Inside Social Games

Playfish, makers of Who Has the Biggest Brain, has another hit Facebook game in Word Challenge. For those of you who were hooked on phonics as a kid, love the game Boggle, or consider yourselves a human Thesaurus – this is an app for you.

Word Challenge, with its adorable interface and Flash graphics, presents a simple challenge: with the scrambled letters, you have to make the most words possible before time runs out. You get more time for every four or five letter word you find. The game is a challenging vocab game adapted beautifully to the social networking platform.

After you are given your score and a title (things like Hermit, Mime, School Bully, etc), you can see your friends’ scores. You can try to beat these scores or you can challenge a friend directly. This may not seem like a great deal of game play depth, and that’s fair, but this game doesn’t really need much. A national list of high scores, weekly updates on high scores, and your friends’ scores is enough to keep you playing to climb the ladder.

I’m awful at this game, but I’ve been playing this game about four times more than I normally do because I hate losing to my friends. Users’ competitive natures will keep them coming back time and time again. Playfish, to their credit, also creates a very friendly interface with a little animated host who tells you adorably insulting things when you stink it up royally. Apparently the brainy little host thinks I have the vocabulary of a school yard bully. Yeah, well, she’s… uh, stupid.

Gameplay: 8

Developers: 8

Words in my vocab: -25