Many of which are word games, and so after the recent discussion somewhere of Quarrel, I thought I'd hit up some recommendations.
If you've got any tips, please share them!
Quarrel Deluxe
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quarrel- ... d453203047 (free version also available)
This is a pretty clever combination of Risk and Scrabble.
At the start of a round, the sectioned map is shared out evenly amongst the matches participants - that's you and 1-3 AI-controlled players.
Each territory will start with between 2 and 7 troops in it. Each of these troops represents a letter on your 'rack'- up to a maximum of 8 troops per territory.
Here's a typical three-way. Player order is randomly assigned at the start of the match.
You battle other people to win territories by declaring a better word than them. Letters are assigned Scrabble-style points; there are some odd ones (R is worth 2, U is worth 3), but this just kind of adds to the game really as makes the combinations a little more unique and something to think about.
When you win a territory, your guys move over to it, leaving one troop behind.
Whenever you have more troops than the AI, there is never a contest (obviously).
Two ways to gain additional troops. Firstly, at the end of your go (turns last as long as you want and still have moves available), all your territories will get reinforcements.
Secondly, performance can gain you backup - if you keep pulling good words out and winning more treasure you'll get backup troops which you can call on once per round at the start of a battle. Also, when two AI players are battling you can instantly get yourselves a backup troop by finding the full anagram before they declare their words.
So there is ALWAYS 8 letters in any round, even if you only have enough troops to play a much shorter word. And there is always an 8 letter word available. These range greatly in difficulty - can't think of any examples of the top of my head as I haven't played it in a week or so, but they include everything from obvious -ING words to complicated plurals I don't even recall seeing on apterous.
A nice touch is the way the game tells you the full anagram for each round. Impressively, it also defines all three permutations - your word, your opponent's word, and the full anagram.
The AI is pretty good, but overall the game isn't hard enough, and none of us apterites will have an issue completing the domination mode (main career-style mode) fairly easily. The biggest pressure is often your own panicking - in the latter stages of the match when you have a full complement of 8 troops it's hard to resist trying to find the full anagram but with the timer at about 15 seconds it doesn't always happen.
Speed is often essential too, the higher-level AI will often find the best possible word they can, which will match yours (this happens quite often with, say, 6 troops but much less so with the full 8 troops, though), and then the battle winner is the one who declared quickest - so there is sometimes a tense trade-off between speed and word score.
It's a wicked game, well made and a brilliant idea. Unfortunately it's severely lacking by having no multiplayer mode - if we could play this against each other, it would NEVER get boring, whereas, as I mentioned before, I haven't picked it up for a week or so since I completed the main mode.
