Scrabble for the iPod - Review

I love playing Scrabble. It's one of the best board games that exists, and has withstood the test of time. 50+ years on forming words with tiles.

So imagine my joy when I found that Electronic Arts created a official Scrabble game for the iPod. So $4.99 later, I started playing the game on my 80GB iPod.

Plus Side: Graphics - Considering the small-ish iPod screen, I'm impressed that it looks as good as it does. It uses the current Scrabble motif - the reds and pinks, and the tiles can be read easily.

Word list - The dictionary used is the current Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th edition. This one doesn't have all the naughty words (that is reserved for tournament players), but it has every word that I know, and a tons of obscure words as well.

Stats - Statistics tracking is neat. It shows how many games you've played, your win percentage, highest scoring play, highest scoring game, best bingo and number of bingoes played.

Neutral Side: Game mechanics - The click wheel is a semi-burden in the game. It's very sensitive to where you place you tiles on the board and sometimes if you are listening to music while playing, you may accidentally pause the track or skip to the next track. Annoying to say the least.

The Zoom - Maneuvering tiles around the board is easy, but when you zoom into the board, it only zooms into one part of the board at a time (whereever your cursor is), but then after the play, it zooms out to the full board. There is no way to zoom into the board and keep it zoomed in. It needs a Zoom toggle.

Down Side: Challenging - Challenging plays is non-existent. It basically follows the British "single challenge" rule, where if you play a word that is not valid, you get to take your tiles back and try again. Which basically makes it easy to just put as many words on to the board until you find a good one. It's not conducive to learning strategy and new words this way.

No game recap - Sadly there is no way to see a recap of the game (what the plays were, what the blanks are, etc.)

The other huge down side is the "Best Word" function. "But wait", I hear you say. "That helps you find words in your rack! How can the be a down side?" Easy. First, for those who want to use this version of game to help their real-life game, there is NO way to turn off this function. Personally, I find it hard to resist the temptation of just hitting the "Best Word" function. Second, it only finds the highest scoring word, and doesn't take into consideration your rack leave. Sometimes the highest scoring play isn't necessarily the best play. You have 4 uses of "Best Word", and it's far to easy to use them and outscore the computer AI.

Overall impressions: I like the game. It's a decent implementation of the game for the iPod. For living room players and casual gamers, it's great. But it falls short in areas that tournament players would like to see.

Grade: B+