‘Appy Days: Wordament

On the face of it, _Wordament_ – with its Scrabble/Boggle hybrid gameplay – appears to resemble pretty much every lexicon based game ever conceived. Operating under a time limit, you are tasked with tracing a path across a grid of letters, each with their own numerical value – so there’s nothing new here.

What sets _Wordament_ apart from its homogenous peers is the fact that it’s a massively multiplayer online game: that is to say you are pitting your linguistic skills against a few thousand international challengers.

At the end of each round you get a breakdown of the word tally you’ve managed to accrue, the most common and obscure words uncovered by the group, and your position on the global leaderboard complete with a percentage value of the people you’ve managed to outwit.

This instant gratification negates the tedium that plagues turn-based titles in the same genre (_Words with Friends_) and provides an impetus to push for those elusive, table-topping high scores. There’s a certain supercilious pleasure to be relished on those successful rounds that see you rocket to the top 100 in the leaderboards; and conversely, a despondency at those times when your trance-like finger dexterity has only afforded you a disappointing mid-table finish.

Coupled with Xbox live integration (complete with Achievements), and periodic bonus rounds that reward you for unearthing words from a particular lexical field, _Wordament_ is a fine example of pick-up-and-play gaming that should be a permanent fixture in the library of every budding wordsmith.