Words with Friends on my iPhone has been an obsession of mine for quite a while. The Scrabble-esqe game is wildly popular in the Apple community due to its uncomplicated design and simplicity with online play. People I know that would never pick up a controller challenge me to a new Words With Friends game every week. When I heard that Words With Friends HD was hitting the iPad, I knew that I had to try it out.

If you play the iPhone / iPod version, you will need to remember your username / password to authenticate the application on the iPad. Otherwise, simply register for a new username and verify your email address. Once the game is up, you have to challenge your friends to play a game, either through their username, Facebook or Twitter. There is no offline mode that you can practice in against AI. You can also challenge random players if you don’t have any friends with an iPhone, iPod or iPad. (Matches work over different multi-platforms; someone on an iPhone can be playing against an iPad)

As you play a game against a friend, notifications will pop up on the iPad when it’s your turn. Depending how long it takes friends to respond, games can last weeks. Fortunately, you can play multiple games at once. I often have a series of 5 or 6 games going at any one time. Navigation of the tiles is pretty much identical to the iPhone version, just on a much larger scale. There’s also space on the screen to bring up the game selector or chat screen as pop-ups rather than switching off the gameboard. It makes communication very handy.

Playing is very simple. You create words on the game board and try to get the maximum number of points on each play. There are double letter, triple letter, double word and triple word multipliers on the board as well. On their turn, players can choose to play a word, pass or switch out all their tiles. It’s often advantageous to keep the triple multipliers out of reach of your opponent as they can pack a 100 point punch on simple words. One tip: If you want to shuffle your tiles around, shake the iPad or iPhone.

While the game is pretty phenomenal, there are a couple points that bug me. There’s no point total preview on the screen when testing out a word. You have to add up all the points in your head when testing words out around the board. Also, there’s no penalty / challenge system for playing incorrect words, just a pop-up that says the word isn’t valid. This often leads people to create real words that they have never heard of just to get major points, simply by testing letters in positions over and over.

Graphics

• Everything is vivid and clear on the iPad. The developer did a good job of taking up the entire iPad screen with the functions of the game. Frankly, I prefer playing on the iPad over the iPhone since it’s easier to grab tiles and pop them into the position.

Audio

• There’s very little audio work in the game beyond from dings on successful word placements and notification rings. But this type of game certainly doesn’t need it. If your iPad is jailbroken, you can listen to Pandora while playing the game. (Native switching will help greatly when the iOs update comes out.)

Conclusion

If you are a fan of Scrabble, Words With Friends for the iPad may very well be a superior alternative. The enormous popularity in the Apple community and quick, simple style of gameplay makes this an absolutely fantastic purchase. It’s currently $2.99 on the app store, but often goes on sale for $0.99. It is worth the full purchase price though.

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