Inside Social Games

With the unveiling of the iPad, the cottage iPad speculation industry that had grown up around it has… kept going. Having seen and, in some cases, actually used the iPad, blogs and magazines are continuing a non-stop torrent of ideas and predictions for the upcoming Apple slate.

A particularly popular subject so far has been games. So we’ve taken some of the better lists out there and combined them — not to pick out specific games (for the most part), but to point out the concepts and game mechanics that are getting the most attention ahead of the iPad’s launch.

For this list, we looked at CNET’s top 30 picks, TechRadar’s top 20, Touch Arcade’s iPhone games to port, and Techland’s 5 games to make ASAP. Here’s what we came up with after melding them all together:

Civilization — This game is a top pick for pretty much everyone. Sid Meier’s classic has always been at least partially about seeing the sprawling extent of your empire, and smaller screens like the iPhone haven’t quite done it justice. Along the same lines, SimCity; and, for the real-time fans, Command & Conquer is a popular choice.

Board games — Another no-brainer, perhaps due to the close resemblance of the iPad to a real-life board. You you can take your pick: Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, Chutes & Ladders or pretty much anything else would work. Several of the lists pick Monopoly, but we’d have to disagree, unless there’s a major breakthrough in battery life.

FarmVille — Maybe it’s just this game’s unending popularity on Facebook, but FarmVille seems to be a consistent pick for any iPad wish-list. There’s certainly a synergy between the intended audiences, although the gameplay might have to be modified for longer play-times.

Line-drawing – CNET wants DrawRace, in which you draw out your car’s intended course, while Touch Arcade wants Boom Brigade, which is a bit like real-time, directed tower defense. The idea is the same in either case: lots of contact between your finger and the screen.

Nintendo games — Techland’s top two picks are both Nintendo games: Scribblenauts and Boom Blox. The latter seems like a good pick; a potential mechanic could involve first touching your target on the screen, then twitching the iPad for an accelerometer “throw”.

Point n’ click adventure — TechRadar suggests Beneath a Steel Sky; our own vote goes to King’s Quest. It’s the ability to tap the screen to achieve any action (this style of game interprets your click to perform the action on its own) that would make these games work.

Physics games — Draw objects with your finger, tilt the iPad to move them around. Crayon Physics, for example, was excellent on the computer, and would probably do even better on an iPad. There’s also World of Goo to consider.

Tower defense — The only question is which tower defense games will do best on the iPad. Fieldrunners would probably do well, as would Plants vs Zombies, which we reviewed earlier tonight. Our own vote is for a graphically amped-up version of Gemcraft, which blends in RPG concepts.

Bright lights, flashing colors — This isn’t a genre, exactly, but extremely visual games seem to be a thematic undercurrent in many of the lists. Pinball, Missile Defense, Geometry Wars — the idea is that the iPad will be bright, beautiful and perfect for some hand-twitching, seizure-inducing action.

Wooden labyrinth — Props to CNET for coming up with this one. This isn’t a computer game, of course. It’s an actual wooden labyrinth in which you guide a stainless-steel ball bearing with physical knobs. The iPad’s accelerometer and flat shape could pull it off perfectly.

Looking through these lists, it might seem that pretty much everything is being fingered as an iPad potential. But we can think of at least a few games that wouldn’t work at all. For example: Whac-a-Mole, played with real hammers. Or, more seriously, any full-on FPS like Quake or Medal of Honor. Without an external controller of any kind, some games will simply be awkward.

Finally, our own pick: Bubble Ghost. Sure, it’s an old game, and one that was never really revived during the console era. But the idea of navigating a bubble through a spiky maze is perfect for some intense iPad gaming, and the internet connection could even make use of some cooperative ghost-play. Just think it over.

Joe Stump, the former lead architect at Digg, recently left to create a new iPhone development company called Blunder Move. The company is planning on specializing in board games for the iPhone, and what better game to start with than one that has remained unchanged for hundreds of years: chess. Chess Wars is the first title from the company, and it integrates social features through Facebook Connect.

The Facebook Connect integration allows players to play asynchronously with anyone that is either on Facebook or the iPhone, but there isn’t too much more beyond chat and notifications. After all, it’s chess. The game does have some features that highlights potential moves, and it can keep track of multiple games based on whose turn it is.

Stump has said that new features are slated in new versions of Chess Wars, but hasn’t announced a time frame. Some concepts the company is looking to add include Push Notification, both Twitter and TwitPic integration, and even greater use of Facebook Connect.

However, there seems to be some other issues that Blunder Move will have to work out first. Chess is chess – to that end, there isn’t much to be done about game play. That much is understandable, but there seems to be a lot of user complaints regarding server reliability. Whether or not this is a problem on the game or user end is irrelevant; it needs to be fixed.

Assuming the game works, this is a pretty clean and fun game for those that enjoy chess. At the moment, it is only $0.99 in the App Store, so it is hardly expensive. We look forward to seeing what comes next from Stump and his team.

Within the realm of casual games, one of the most popular sub-genres are word games. We have seen many such games appear in the social space before ranging from Scrabble and Lexulous to Playfish’s Word Challenge and Zynga’s Word Twist, but aside from the Scrabble-type games, there isn’t much in the way of true multiplayer experiences. A new startup from Bangalore, India, iPlaySocial is looking to usurp the 80 year old game with its very own, and very different title, Grabbler.

This particular game plays almost like a reverse of Scrabble. Rather than placing words on a board from a pool of letters, players find themselves making a selection of words on a board. No, it is not a word find. Players are given a 12×12 grid of letters with four cubes selected in the center of the game board, and must create a word that builds from one of them. The trick, however, is that each cube can be selected and rotated to change the letter displayed.

The game continues until each player passes consecutively and cannot make any new words from the grid. Like with the initial four cubes, and like Scrabble, players want to try to interconnect and use their opponent’s letters for more points. As you can probably guess, the one with the most points at the end of the game wins.

Grabbler is certainly an interesting game but its most unique feature is a bit of a double edged sword. The human brain works and remembers most things through patterns (hence why people use mnemonic devices). Take Word Challenge for example: The player is presented with an empty list of possible terms of varying sizes to fill with words formed from a handful of scrambled letters. The way the brain is able to compose those words is by seeing patterns within the mess of letters.

What is the pattern? It depends on the person, but a common way is recognizing full words merely by seeing the first and last letters. Take a scrambled word like “hrsoe.” From these letters you can probably see “horse” because your brain picks up the first and last letters and fills in the rest with what it expects. Therein lies an issue with Grabbler: Since the you cannot see all six sides of a cube, finding a word becomes an effort in guessing. Granted, as the game progresses, there are less guesses to make, but you still end up flipping letters as you try to figure out words on the spot. Unlike Scrabble, you cannot plan ahead and strategize quite as well.

Nevertheless, Grabbler is still an interesting word game for those that like the genre. It’s different, clean looking, and is one of the few that allow you to play with multiple people. It is actually likely that anyone who plays the game for a while will develop tricks, strategies, and begin to see their own patterns. Assuming this is the case, Grabbler could very well take off, and surprisingly enough, it is the hope of the developer that the game will become popular enough to become a physical board game. At the moment, it is difficult to tell when and if this will happen, but if it does, it will mark a very curious first for the social gaming space.

The Argawalla brothers may be best known for Scrabulous and their follow-up game Wordscraper, but they do have other titles on offer. One of those is Chess Pro, the classic game available for you and a Facebook friend to play together.

As you can see from the image above, the game has been kept very simple. The chess pieces follow a simple, clear design and appear on a numbered chess board.

Players perform moves by clicking over a piece with the mouse and dragging it to the desired board square. When happy you click the “Play Move” button and the board gets updated. One problem I had with this was the other player didn’t automatically get their version of the board updated, so you sit there constantly hitting the refresh button when it is your opponents turn.

A small chat box forms part of the interface making communication simpler between players, but this is again hampered by the update issue. Messages don’t get displayed unless you hit the refresh button. Checking the options you can select the board auto-update, but this seems to be limited to every 2 minutes. Why not just have an update for both players every time an action is performed?

One of the game’s features is the ability to not only play simultaneous games, but also continue a game when the other player is offline. This means you can have a long-lasting game without the problem of you both needing to be online at the same time to play.

Chess Pro is not the only chess game available on Facebook. Just putting the term “Chess” into the Facebook search box gets you 5 pages of results. From playing a few from the list I believe Chess Pro needs to improve in a number of areas before it becomes the chess game of choice on the network.

To begin with there is no AI option so you have to play against a friend. Having an option to play against the computer is a good backup in case your chess playing buddies aren’t around, although the option to play against an offline friend is a plus point. Graphically it is also lacking and there are some better alternatives available.

Finally, it has no aids for the new Chess player. This would be useful as if you are new to the game it can be difficult to remember where some pieces can move. Alternative Chess Fan, for example, highlights the available destination squares your piece can move to when you click on it. It sounds simple, but very useful for a new player.

Right now, if you asked me to recommend a chess game on Facebook it would be difficult to whittle the choices down to just one. Chess Pro is a capable implementation with a nice simultaneous game and offline play feature, but it is limited and there are alternatives that offer more in terms of graphics and play options. The lack of automatic refresh-on-action updates also counts against it.

A day after Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla took the game offline in the US and Canada, the team of Indian brothers has relaunched the game with a new name and board design: Wordscraper. Wordscraper uses the same UI as the old Scrabulous and is played essentially the same way Scrabble is played, but with different “bonus tiles” and board dimensions.

Meanwhile, the official version of Facebook Scrabble, developed by EA under license from Hasbro, has experienced continued growth in the first day since Scrabble’s disappearance: usage has grown to nearly 60,000 daily active users. At its peak, Scrabulous drew over 700,000 daily active users.

We’ll track the growth of both games to see whether users will migrate to Wordscraper or the official version of Scrabble.

This morning, Vindu Goel at the NYT reported that Scrabulous, the popular Facebook game and Scrabble clone, had been shut down. Just last week, Hasbro, owner of Scrabble IP in North America, filed a DMCA claim against the makers of the game.

However, it appears that the take-down was not Facebook’s doing. Instead, it was a voluntary move by the Agarwalla Brothers (see interview here) while they sort out their legal matters in North America. Scrabulous remains accessible elsewhere in the world.

> Read more at Inside Facebook

For a young couple living in Chile and teaching English, playing Scramble together on Facebook became an outlet for their love of word games. Tyler Richardson and his fiancée Christine play so often that Tyler came up with a brilliant idea: to propose to her in a game.

With the help of Zynga, Tyler sent her on a secret agent scavenger hunt within a special Scramble game containing the words “Will You Marry Me.”  Her mission was to decode the message before time runs out and save the world.

“I had been trying to think of a creative way to engage for a while,” said Tyler, remembering his planning process. “We like spy movies, so I decided to send her on a scavenger hunt where she would be a secret agent. The Scramble folks were nice enough to fill in a board with a ‘marry me’ message and it became a mission to decode the secret message before time ran out and she was discovered.”

How did it work out?

“I think she really liked it, at least that is what she told me!  She said yes,” Tyler grins.

The couple, who met in college at UC Santa Barbara, will be finishing their teaching stint at a community college in Conception, Chile, before they tie the knot later this year.

I’m still waiting for Facebook developers to translate the iconic Candy Land from board game form to a Flash-intensive social romp. Even this jaded reviewer gets nostalgic for some games. Guess the Sketch Challenge is a “Pictionary” type game cleverly translated to the chat-heavy internet.

The cheery Flash interface explains the simple rules of the game: you are part of a large gaming room with ten or so other players. Each round, someone will draw an assigned object and you guess using the chat feature what that word is. You get more points the sooner you guess the word, and the game cleverly has a filter so that correct answers don’t show up in the chat- only wrong answers. This ensures that you can’t just wait till your friends say the correct word and take credit for it by repeating it.

If you’re good at drawing and a have a great vocabulary, you’ll love this game. The drawing feature is also a real breeze to use- you have a countdown timer and a full palette of colors and brush sizes to use. Black and white usually will do it, though. As the artist, you get the most points when other people guess your drawing quickly. If the word is too tough, you can always pass.

You can challenge friends, see your global rankings, and invite friends to receive bonus hints – giving you a distinct advantage in the game. This latter feature is a unique way to promote the game.

The synchronous elements here are some of the best I’ve seen – you can instantly jump into a new game with several other people and play. In my mind, it’s one of the best Facebook games out there that’s actually both challenging and fun. Guess the Sketch Challenge is an example of why board games work as social games. Bravo.

Gameplay: 8

Developers: 9

Sociality: 9

Hasbro and EA announced today that the two companies will soon launch an official version of Scrabble on Facebook. Interestingly, their press release makes no mention of Scrabulous, although it does mention “the current interest in Scrabble for social networking”.

So will the creators of Scrabulous (the Agarwalla brothers) be quaking in their boots that everyone will migrate away to the official game? Probably not. For one, there is already an official version of Scrabble on Facebook for users outside North America (licensed by Mattel, the owners of Scrabble outside of the US and Canada, and produced by RealNetworks). It currently has less than 6,000 daily active users, compared to Scrabulous with just over 450,000. This version has been out since late March and has shown little growth since then.

> Read the full story at Inside Facebook