Whew, OK, so I'm all caught up on movies. Another category in my obsessive documentation is video games I've played. Now my usual rule is to only review a game when I've finished it (and I'm getting better in my time management in just deciding that a game is going to be no fun and giving up before sinking dozens of hours into it*) but there are some kinds of games that don't have a narrative or levels and that you never finish, you just play over and over. Like Words With Friends (iTunes link), which doesn't even have a computer opponent option—it's all games against real people.
WWF is Scrabble**, more or less (though the location of the bonus tiles is shifted around, and the point values of a few tiles are different). It's also, at least amongst me and my friends, very much a play-by-mail model: you take your turns at your leisure and then send them off to your friends to return in their own time. There's often multiple days between turns, which none of my friends seem to mind. Oh, another big difference to in-person Scrabble is that there's no mechanism for challenges, the game just won't let you play a word that isn't in its dictionary. This occasionally leads to a trial-and-error method of play that drives some people crazy. If you're not one of them, I'm "fuzzygerdes" in WWF.
FuzzyCo grade: A
* Abandoned this year, Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, Prince of Persia, and LEGO Harry Potter, among others.
** There is an official version of Scrabble for the iPhone, but where WWF has their own multiplayer infrastructure, Scrabble uses Facebook and somehow I'm just not comfortable giving Facebook yet another hook into my life.
