From the makers of 7 Little Words and Red Herring, Monkey Wrench is a word search puzzle where you've got to find the words among the hexagonal grid of letters. The monkey wrench in the process is that you don't get a list of words to find, you've got to figure that out yourself! You'll go bananas for this free iOS puzzle that's easy to learn, tricky to play, and hard to put down.

From the creators of Triple Town and other hits comes an un-BEAR-ably adorable word game, free for iOS and Android! Tap letters on the board to spell words and make your bears grow bigger, unlocking different power-up bears as you go, but beware! Each round, letters that are unused count down, and if they reach zero, they'll turn to stone and become immovable!

When the Languinis anger their god, they pay the price by getting locked up. In this unique blend of word game and match-3 puzzle free for iOS and Android, it's up to you to rescue them by clearing the objectives on each level. Swipe to match tiles to make letters, then find words in order to move on and save the Languinis.

Test your wordsmithing skills in Lettercraft for iOS. Sure you can spell words at your leisure, but are you up to the task when the letters are threatening to burn up if you don't use them? Race the clock, try for high scores and more in this exciting word game.

Love word puzzles and don't want a lot of pomp and flash? This sleek puzzle game combines word scrambles with crosswords for a whopping 360 levels of relaxing, simple but engaging gameplay on your iOS.

Like its predecessor, Onomastica 2, the puzzle platformer/interactive art piece by mif2000, takes place in a world where words and objects are interchangeable. And also, like the original, it is whimsical, clever, and over way too quickly. Still, it's such a fun little art deco world to play around in, that players who like minding their words won't mind too much.

This clever escape game by Gatamari is themed around spelling English words to make things happen around the room, with puzzles that are challenging whether they're about wordplay or not.

SimCity meets Scribblenauts in the unique strategy building sim Lexicopolis: A-B-City! From "apartment" to "zoo," design your perfect town while literally earning points for originality. With over 300 words programmed into the game, there's plenty of fun to be had!

From mobile puzzle maestro Kris Pixton, SpellPix is a new take on the path-drawing logic puzzle seen in games like HUEBRIX or Conceptis' Link-a-Pix. The idea is to connect the marked letters to an identically marked letter somewhere else on the grid. The path can snake around as much as it likes, but it has to be unbroken. In SpellPix, each grid square has a letter, so with every pair of letters you match up, you'll also spell a word.

Sixteen clues need to be sorted into four groups. No, it's not Only Connect... but it's close! Red Herring is a word-sorting puzzle where you've got to divide the tiles into four clusters of related items, the last of which always holds the devious red herrings whose only connection is that they don't connect to anything! It's a tricky challenge avoiding the false paths to find a solution, but multiple difficulty levels make this mobile delight accessible to all levels of puzzlers.

You have two minutes to turn a falling mess of letter tiles into words. Think you're up to the challenge? Fiasco! from Blinking Pixels combines Tetris with Scrabble in the most frantic way possible. Letters fall from the top of the screen and can be swiped and stacked below. Arrange them to spell words, then give them a tap to convert them into points. Work in as many long words as you can and you just might turn this fiasco into a triumph!

"Words & Cards," you ask, "could it be a game about dinosaurs and Swiss watches?" Alas, no. In Words & Cards, you've got to make a word from a pool of letters you share with your opponent. Each consonant in the word you play turns into a playing card, with which you can score extra points by making poker hands. It sounds simple (and it is), but there's more strategy involved than you might think.

Help Grimm rid the dungeons of baddies in this charming word game. Use the power of spelling (and your scythe) to attack creatures who retaliate in many different ways. Earn gems to upgrade your abilities before taking on the bosses. Will words win out? It's up to you!

It's tempting to fake redact half of this review, just to fit in with the theme of Blackbar. We'll resist the temptation, though, as this is a game that's worth talking about. Created by Nevan Mrgan, Blackbar is a word-based puzzle game where you sift through letters written to and from characters and try to figure out which words were blanked out by the Department of Communications. It's one part sci-fi story game, one part political statement, and three parts just plain awesome.

It's time for a simple, soothing word game. What's the Sentence from Tinyworks Games is a straightforward game that combines anagrams with famous quotes. A baseline of six letter tiles rests at the bottom of the screen. Above are several words with blank spots in place of letters. Tap the word you want to work with, then tap your inventory to start filling them in. Repeat the process until the famous quote is complete!

Marty Sears' popular combination of anagrams, block-sliding, hilarious animations, and hair-pulling difficulty has become a quadrilogy with Blocks With Letters On 4. It's as punishing and as hilarious as it's ever been, and this time, the background is green!

Want a word game? Want a SWANKY word game? Then check out the short but stylish title from mif2000 that sends you running through a world of words you can combine to change the landscape and their meaning!

In a situation that hits a little too close to home for some of us, Coolson's Artisanal Chocolate Alphabet from Things Made Out Of Other Things is a word game based in a chocolate factory starring an out of work English major desperate for a job. You manage to get a position at Coolson's factory packing boxes with letter-embossed chocolates. But since dropping squares into slots isn't all that exciting (and since you want to put that fancy degree to use), you decide to make things more difficult/entertaining for yourself. Instead of filling boxes, now you're writing words!

The realm needs a hero skilled in the works of dream magic to stop Lord Nightmare! Too bad all they have is you, and you just crawled out of the bushes after a night of hard partying. Kingdom of Loathing creators Asymmetric Productions deliver a fun and dangerously addictive hybrid of word puzzle and RPG adventure in this indie hit.

Moon Logic Enterprised has recovered several stone tablets from a tower just discovered on what was thought a lifeless planet. It's up to you, a professor of xenolinguistices, to translate the text and unlock alien mysteries, in Stranger Than Fiction by Stuart Madafiglio. A puzzle rumination on life, the universe, and everything, the game's cryptogram challenges are rather on the easy side, but overall it is a meditative, original, and quietly satisfying peak into another world.

Originally released as a Windows Phone game, Wordament from Microsoft is a straightforward Boggle-like word game that's heavy on statistics and competitive scores. Round after round of letter arrangements you'll see, utilizing your precious few minutes to spell as many words as you can before it's on to the scoreboard followed by the next letter grid. And if you're not as interested in beating everyone over the head with your fast-finding word skills, you can also just, you know, play the game and have a good time!

Graduation time at Spellwood Academy! Biggles the bespectacled bunny wizard is ready for finals, but unlike most school exams, these happen to be quite entertaining. Spellwood from Three Rings (creator of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates) drops you in a cheery fantasy world of one-on-one word battles, allowing you to face off against opponents in turn-based tile combat. Think of it as Scrabble meets Puzzle Quest with wands and anthropomorphic animals and you'll have a good idea what to expect!

There's no need to bother with crazy cryptic clues when you solve a Gryptics puzzle, because they're all about finding the twelve words that fit perfectly in each mini-crossword. There's only one perfect solution, but there may be plenty of red herrings waiting to trip you up. Fire up your vocabulary box and see what words you can come up with in this intriguing minimalist word puzzle.

Welcome to the life of a teaching assistant (and/or editor)! The Grading Game by Mode of Expression is a beefed-up version of the arcade-style browser release First Person Tutor. It puts you in the unenviable role of a TA grading papers for a grumpy proffessor who wants his students to get the grade they deserve: a perfect F! Since you're a bit strapped for cash you have no choice but to capitulate, sifting through papers and marking every error you see with a big red pen.

QatQi is like Scrabble with fewer letters and a much more pressing size constraint. The unique word puzzle game from ZWorkBench gives you a small handful of letters, each with its own value, and sets you in front of a small board and tells you "Go forth! Spell!" The catch is you must use all of the letters in order to pass the stage (some children don't have the luxury of wasting letters, you know), forcing frequent use of the undo button when you can't seem to get it just right. If you're both lucky and possess an unusually lush vocabulary, you might just find yourself on QatQi's high score board!

We've waited a long, long, long time, but the follow-up to Cliff Johnson's seminal puzzle game The Fool's Errand has finally been released: The Fool and His Money. Packed with logic and word puzzles of all kinds, and the whimsically confounding prose that made the original so enjoyable, The Fool and His Money is just the thing for players looking for a mental challenge.

Behold, a delicious platter of letters. They're all yours to take... but you must guard them from your thieving opponent! Letterpress is a multiplayer word game with a cool strategic twist where making words is only half the battle; you've got to fight to keep your letters. It's a quick pick-up-and-put-down game perfect for matches with friends on Game Center. That is, if you like dominating your friends with your vocabulary.

Billed as a crossword game with a twist, KRIZL from Rekim is a mobile puzzle game that challenges your word skills along with spatial recognition. There are no riddles to solve or questions to answer, so instead of scratching your head over obscure pop culture references, you'll spend your time rotating grid pieces so that every stream of letters spells a complete word. It's a great way to make crossword puzzles more casual!

Polish your pop culture recognition and your eyeballs in this latest installment of Nitrome's popular word trivia series! Identify more tiny characters, real or fictional, as they file on stage... and no, it turns out "that one guy who was in the show on channel 6, you know, with the pants" isn't a valid answer.

You've got bubbles. You've got letters. And you've got a powerful need to spell some words, all while swapping orbs against the clock. That's the basic premise of Burble and Burble Select, a word game meets marble popper from Charlie Dog Games. Using the power of your hand, drag and drop letter bubbles to switch position with other bubbles, all while the chain of orbs slowly advances down the track. Your goal is to spell four letter and above words, eliminating bubbles and postponing your Level Lost! for another day. Act fast and hope your vocabulary is as flexible as it is comprehensive!

We all love metroidvanias! But would we still love them if, instead of controlling a scifi bounty hunter, or a badass vampire slayer, we played as the alphabet? Answer: Yes! And ASCIIvania, an exploration platformer by Gharding3, is the proof! ASCIIvania is clearer documentation, a map screen and a mute button away from excellence, but its still a fun time.

Gear up for some bizarre new words that wouldn't make it past any English teacher's red pen with Xether Labs's free iOS word puzzle! The concept and gameplay is simple... figure out the clues and fill in the blanks to reveal the strange new word you get by combining the two solutions. Best enjoyed passed back and forth on the couch with a witty and weird friend, it's the sort of breezy, simple, silly game mobile devices seem perfectly designed for to help you enjoy yourself whenever you have a spare moment.

Witherworth University Professor Nathaniel Paynuss believes that proof-reading is meant to be a weapon to get back at those snotty collegiate brats making fun of him on "The Face Book". In First Person Tutor, an "educational" arcade game developed by Big Blue Boo Labs for the 7 Day FPS Game Jam, you play the role of beleaguered TA to the evil professor, held captive by a huge pile of student debt. You have a stack of papers to mark, and a score of professorial grudges Paynuss would be happy to settle by GPA proxy. You know what you have to do. The unique premise of First Person Tutor should appeal many on the internet, but it's very polished for a Game Jam work. The dark satire of college politics should give it wider appeal.

This little girl named Mabel is stuck in a cavern and her only means of escaping is combining letter creatures into words and use them as platforms to climb out. A cross between a platformer and a word puzzle game that gives you the challenge of navigating platforms carefully while making intricate words for as many points as possible. Your high score and hopes of surviving all hinge on your extensive vocabulary knowledge and quick thinking in this game by Joel Esler.

Lexcavator is a wonderfully chirpy word-based puzzle game by Adam Parrish that combines elements of Dig Dug with spelling games like Bookworm. Your goal is to bash away at the letter tiles by spelling out words, clearing the way so the protagonist can hop further down the level. It requires a lot of careful thinking to prevent capturing yourself in a corner, so enter only if your vocabulary and tactical skills are up for a challenge!

One area where organic intelligence beats artificial intelligence every time is finding abstract relationships between two or more things. That, and explaining exactly why Desperate Housewives is still on the air (although that still baffles most human brains). Word to Word plays on our noggin's ability to associate conceptual ideas by presenting you with two lists of words. Your job is to pair them up, tapping a word on the left and matching it to a word on the right. You can't move on until everything is correctly paired up, so you have to think both inside the box and outside of it at the same time!

The early morning car ride, the smelly waiting room, and scary needles are the worst part of a trip to the doctor. Let's face it; robots have it easy when it comes to medical care! Defective 'droids get their medicine in quite a shocking way in the mobile word game RoboFlu. You think electroshock therapy wouldn't be the best method of healing, but those viruses need to be purged somehow, right?

If you always liked playing Pictionary as a board game with friends, now you can doodle away mobile style with Draw Something. A game very similar to Charadium or XSketch, OMGPOP brings players a socially addicting Pictionary-style game to both iOS and Android platforms. The game has even become so popular that it could possibly spawn a TV show!

Well, do ya? Because if you don't, you might as well just give up now, this game is too much for you. In fact, give up writing and talking altogether. Why bother, right? Kinda hard not to accept a challenge as brazen as the one brought forth in the title of So You Think You Know Words. Fortunately, the mobile word game doesn't skimp in the content department, allowing you to spend hours on end proving that you do, indeed, know words.

Wordsplosion is a hip, stylish word game that's very similar to the classic board game Mastermind as well as the more recent Wordspector. Your goal is to guess a series of five letter words using a single starting clue. You're given the first letter for free, but in order to figure out the rest, you'll need a combination of skill, luck, trial and error, and maybe a nice dictionary!

Remarkable as the first collaboration between fans and game developer, Nitrome, this pop culture trivia games delivers clues via cable car in the form of teeny tiny, yet surprisingly detailed, characters. Hangman-style letter blanks also help out as you attempt to name, and correctly spell, the famous figures from fiction, movies, music, television and more. When you think you know it, use your keyboard to type it in and bask in the fanfare while the next VIP is delivered to the stage via cable car. Fanboys and fangirls, rejoice!

Can't decide if you should play a game of solitaire or a word game? How about "both" so you can stop arguing with yourself and just play? Similar to Word Solitaire in basic concept, Deck of Words delivers exactly what it promises in the title: a deck of lettered cards that must be used to make words. Stack everything just right to spell the most valuable words you can conjure, or else you'll find yourself at the end of the pile with very little to show for your work!

Proke, a word game developed by Peter Hastings, is all about vocabulary building... literally! The goal of it is to build a mighty tower to the heavens, and your only tools are quick thinking and linguistic fortitude. While racing the clock, type a word that has the designated prefix or suffix, or for extra height, both. The faster you type, the higher you'll build. Extra points can be scored for typing the letters that appear in Bonus Bubbles, or doing combos of words with same prefix/suffix. Proke is a light kind of game, but it's very addictive.

What a world we live in, where mankind can walk on the moon, salad can be purchased in cups, and falling block puzzles can be fused with word games. If you're ready for your brain to have a little run through the multitasking wringer, Puzzlejuice is without a doubt the best way to hurt your synapses. With a little Tetris-like block arranging and a little Spelltower-style word building, you, too, can drive yourself mad with delight!

e slow paced but challenging iOS title from Highline Games has a sharp focus that sticks firmly to word crafting. No weirdo bonus mini-games, clowns, hidden objects or other gimmicks, just long levels of wrapping your brain around a grid of letters. Oh, and just so you know, W.E.L.D.E.R. stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. Aren't you glad you were curious?!

Alone. A word that has both good and bad connotations. For Matt Rix' Ludum Dare entry, it's a goal. In The Word Alone, you are given a Boggle-esque board where you are tasked to eliminate all the other letters to leave just 'A', 'L', 'O', 'N' and 'E'. Do you have the word and spatial genius to accomplish this?

From the creator of Unify, BitPilot, and Halcyon, Zach Gage, comes an iPad release that blends a Boggle-like word game with a traditional falling blocks puzzle. SpellTower is a wordophile's dream come true, featuring four unique modes of play that let you take your time and think or force you to build words in a rush. No matter your playing style, there's plenty of challenge in this sleek little release, and it's worth picking up if you have even the slightest interest in word games!

I have to admit, if I was ever sucked into a Tron-like computer world, I don't know if I would be able to handle the games they would force me to play. Since getting my motorcycle, I think I could manage a draw in light-cycles, but Deadly Discs? Solar Sailor? Brawls at the End of Line club? I think I'd be derezzed pretty quickly. On the other hand, should the Master Computer challenge me to a game of hangman, I think I could take him. Such is the scenario presented by Langman, the new unity platforming word game from Von Lehe Creative.

Buried in the dirt or sitting in the open pathways are letters or bones, simply run across them (or dig across them) to pick them up. Spell words to earn bones to buy bonuses and to move further in the game. Simple to learn with a lot of vocabulary complexity to be found, Word Up Dog! is casual gameplay that can suck you in and give you hours and hours of enjoyment. This fun, amusing, challenging game of spelling is entertainment for a wide range of ages, from those youngsters who want to improve their mad spellin' skillz to the older folks who enjoy a vocabulary challenge.

Word Bubbles is a word game of a different sort, exercising your brain as you devour round after round of word-guessing goodness. Enter as many words that begin with the set of letters given at the beginning. Float the numbered bubbles to the top and you'll earn a star!

Moxie 2 is a solitaire puzzle game where you try to create words by modifying or adding letters to existing words. Each letter has a different point value, and larger words earn you more points. Earn the most points by forming special Moxie words, based on animals, vegetables, or minerals. A simple concept with surprisingly deep, addictive play.

The third installment in the block-manipulating, anagram-solving, funny-bone-tickling series, the first installment of which was voted one of the Best Games of 2008 by JIG. After nearly two sad blockless years, Marty Sears is back with all the fiendish brain-teasing action and absurd animations fans have come to expect. And if you're new to BWLO, you'll find this even more of a treat... and even more of a punishment. A punishing treat? Anyway, yay!

WayWords, TwistedSimple's new word puzzle release, is one part Boggle, two parts Magic Square, and three parts playing around with alphabet blocks. It has the sort of aesthetic that wouldn't be out of place between the Crossword and the Sudoku in your daily newspaper, and gameplay that would fit right in between Scrabble and Upwords in the ol' game cabinet.

KrissX ("criss-cross") is a rare and well-polished entry in the downloadable word game category. It's not a spelling game, it's not a word search/scramble game, it's not a guessing game (well, it kinda is); instead KrissX combines a familiar mechanic from matching games with letters and clues, creating something that resembles a mixture of Bejeweled and a crossword puzzle.

Lateral is a word game that pushes you to think outside the box. Try and guess the hidden word or phrase by looking at the words it's connected to. Cat plus fish equals catfish, but rarely will your task be that simple!

It's word game meets physics puzzle in Prose and Motion, a unique game by DeeperBeige. Click and drag letters to the starting point on each stage, carefully arranging them one by one in a neat little row. Spell a word to move on to the next level, spell the correct word and you're even more awesome!

Grab your magnifying glasses and reading glasses, it's time to become a dictionary detective! Or a lexicon lawman. Or a syllable sleuth. Perhaps an alliterative agent? Wordspector is a fast-paced word game that will have you scrambling to find the secret word using deduction and a bit of luck.

Set sail for action, adventure, and... spelling? When Lucy runs away from home to avoid being shipped off for her tomboy behaviours, she never imagined she'd get wrapped up in a conspiracy involving the powerful East India Trading Company. Now she has to fight her way through a horde of pirates and rivals in her efforts to save countless lives and her family's name. Sink your opponents by spelling out words that charge your cannons in this clever new adventure release from Moonpod and unleash the Pirate Princess in you! We know you've got one.

Do morphemes of prodigious extensiveness accelerate your cardiovascular thingamajig? If so, why not try Word Machine, a word construction game from Pascal Le Merrer?

What do you do when a rival inventor shows up with his band of mechanical spiders to steal the blueprints made by a fantastic machine that runs on language? Why, you strap on your vocabulary and feed the biggest, meatiest words you can think of into the machine so it can blast the intruders with a cannon! No, don't stop to think about machines using words for fuel, or how exactly one might strap their vocabulary to anything, you've got shooting to do!

Qbox is a neat little variation of a Jumble or a crossword, in which you try to decipher famous quotes from one of three historical eras. These quotes are laid out in a grid, and the letters have been scrambled within their respective columns only. Swap letters in the same column and when the correct word is formed it will lock into place.

Dungeon Scroll Gold Edition is a now-classic word game that gracefully blends a dungeon crawling RPG setting into a letter arrangement game. Much like Bookworm Adventures has done for the puzzle/RPG hybrid, Dungeon Scroll helped move word games a step out of the brainy category and into the realm of casual entertainment. You still have a meaty word-based puzzle experience on your hands, but now you have more than a high score to keep you addicted.

You are presented with a series of letter tiles, scrambled into gibberish. Your job is to swap tiles two at a time, hopefully uncovering the hidden palindrome. At first, most of the words will induce some eye-rolling, as you'll get "ott" and have a hint of "a small child". But watch out when the game starts flipping open other languages' dictionaries to find some truly heinous fare.

The new game from Gregory Weir is an unabashedly highbrow and experimental platform game, where the ground is made up of literature. Try to touch as many words as you can, as prose by H.P. Lovecraft, T.S. Eliot and others stretches out before you. It's interesting enough just to be forced to read by a platform game, but the real treat is all the visual embellishments.

It's word game meets RPG in the excellent release from PopCap, Bookworm Adventures Volume 2! Mother Goose leaps from the pages of her book when the Big Bad Wolf comes a-knockin', and our bespectacled hero Lex is the only one who can help. Spell words to damage each enemy as you work your way through 30 chapters, gaining levels and earning unique trophies along the way. It's everything the original Bookworm Adventures was with a little extra oomph.

Tonypa's new word game asks you to make as many unique words as you can within a string of seven letters. The difference between this and any number of Scrabble variants is that you can't rearrange the letters. Instead, you place them one at a time somewhere in the row. The catch? You can't use any word more than once. Good luck staying in the game as your vocabulary dwindles!

Forget your power-ups and your super-combos. It's time to do your best flat-foot impersonation and hit the street after your target in this unique typing game, where your wheels only turn as fast as your fingers fly. Featuring a snarky sense of humour and a noir atmosphere on top of some of the craziest dialogue around, The Red Herring Chase is a brilliant little gem of a game that may or may not break all your fingers.

The unassuming DeepLeap might well be one of the best pure word games to grace the internet in quite a while. Javascript guru John Resig combines the basic gameplay of Scrabble with the sweat-inducing intensity of Text Twist in this fast-paced word-forming game.

Globetrotter is as simple as it gets. You're given a map and you're given a location, and you must click on where you think that location is on the map. Sure, this is easy if you're looking for New York, United States or London, England, but good luck with Tunis, Tunisia on your first go, and believe me, Australia can be trickier than you may think.

Sentences is a word game by Pictogame that allows you to recreate famous sayings, combining familiar game elements into one fast-paced language-fest. Each of ten rounds tests your speed-typing, word-rearranging, or Hangman skills. There are 200 quotes to unlock, and each round has a bronze, silver, and gold medal score that require tremendous accuracy and speed. It's simple to play, tricky to master, and has a little bit of an educational edge. Give it a try.

"What good is Magnetic Poetry if you can't be the best at it?" you might be saying. Well, wonder no more, for Paul Preece and David Scott (AKA the Casual Collective) have just the thing: Farragomate! Compete against up to 9 others to make the best sentence out of a given pool of words.

Blocks With Letters On is a game that seamlessly combines language riddles with physical tile puzzles. Each level provides you with an assortment of blocks (with letters on), and you must find a way to position them in the supplied pink spaces so that they spell an English word. This sequel's difficulty picks up at the point where the last game left off. Which was already freakishly difficult. Be warned.

An anagram puzzle game from Martin Sears, presented with the distinct flavor of British educational programming. Don't be fooled by the charming hand-drawn appearance and the curiously twisted vignettes between levels; don't worry if the first few levels seem too basic. This turns into a serious brain-twister.

PictoWords is a casual word game similar to a rebus puzzle — you know the ones, in which you form a word or phrase from pictures and letters. Each round you're offered a selection of square picture tiles, round letter tiles, and a few hints in case you get stuck. It's your job to fill in as many words as you can using both pictures and letters. It's a slightly quirky but very challenging word game that stretches both sides of your brain.

Seek Ver. 0 tasks you with protecting your column of hearts from a stampede of letters sliding in from the right. As letters appear on the conveyor belt, you must quickly find and click the matching letter in the grid below. But if you are too slow, or if you click the wrong letter, one of your hearts will be wiped out.

A game that combines wordplay with Sokoban-style block pushing? Are they mad?!? Arrange blocks with letters to form words by sliding them into place. Luckily, Alphabox recognizes solutions apart from the one intended, so sometimes you can get creative and mix the letters around, saving a few moves. A level editor extends the replay value of this innovative puzzler.

Countdown is based on one of the longest running game shows in the world, and this Flash game does a good job of staying true to the original game on TV. The game features two contestants battling it out in a game of letters, numbers, and "the crucial Countdown Conundrum." Each round is played against a giant 30-second clock, while the famous Countdown music plays. If you're a game show fan, don't miss this one.

I think many people who frequent this site would agree: Tonypa is one of our favorite casual game designers. Grow Word, his submission to Casual Gameplay's second competition exhibits many of the characteristics that we have come to love about Tonypa's games: it's elegant, understated, and easy to learn but hard to master.

Verbotomy is an online word game where you create words out of a given definition. Each day you're presented with a definition and must come up with an original word to match. You can save your words and build up points towards each round of play. You can also vote on your favorite entries and subscribe to an RSS feed so you can know immediately when a new verboticism is ready and waiting.

I've often thought that Jayisgames doesn't have anywhere near enough word games for my liking, and this almost makes up for that lack. This is a quick, clever Flash crossword puzzle from Taro Ito of Gamedesign, who brought us the recently-reviewed White Jigsaw and other addictive favourites of this site (Dice Wars anyone?), and it lives up to his previous standard. If you've a hankering for word puzzles, speak fluent English and have five minutes to spare I think you'll really like this.

Halloween Hangman is a simple, cute, and rather amusing Halloween-themed game of hangman. Choose letters from the tiles on screen and try to guess the mystery word or phrase. Make a wrong choice and the smarty-pants skeleton hanging from a rope will hand you a snide comment or two.

The computer game is not the strongest medium for word games. The crossword puzzle and word jumble dominate the papers; Boggle is the board game master. Computer games are often overlooked by the linguistically minded. But then, Text Twist changes all that. I'm tempted to call it the best word game I've ever played.

Ah, the rural life. Nothing but vast expanses of farmland, the occasional sounds of the barnyard animals, and life-shortening, back-breaking manual labor. But Funny Farm, by Igor Naverniouk, is distinctly different than the farmer lifestyle. This word association game starts on the farm, but quickly branches out into greener pastures.

Cyptograma has to be the most appealing interface to a cryptographic puzzle that I have ever seen. The game features quotes and phrases to decrypt from famous people, and are available in either English or Español. Each puzzle is in the form of a simple substitution cipher in which each letter of the phrase is substituted with a symbol. It is up to you to figure out the letter that each symbol corresponds to.

Word Sandwich is a free online Flash game that adds something a little different to the word game genre. The goal of the game is to guess the mystery five-letter word. Simple to play and difficult to master, the game can be highly addictive. Consider yourself warned. The combination of guesswork and alphabetic strategy (with a nice jazzy musical score) grabs you pretty quickly.

Fastr is a multiplayer guess-the-image-tag game similar to the previously reviewed single-player game, Guess-the-Google. Instead, this game makes use of the flickr API to create a well-designed and enjoyable multiplayer experience that can even be rather addictive with a sharp group of people playing.

Remember the typing game, Letters, that was reviewed here in November? Well, the author, Hannu Pelkonen, has released a very significant addition to the series: Words! Though lacking the power-ups of Letters, Words uses the same slick interface and addictive dynamic high score display that updates your rank in real-time while you play.

Another great word game from East of the Web, this one combines the word finding frenzy of Boggle with the scrambled word anagrams of Jumble. 8 Letters in Search of a Word is a race against the clock to score enough points to move on to the next level. Points are awarded by finding words within an 8-letter anagram, established at the beginning of each level.

Just found this excellent collection of word games created in Flash and published by East of the Web. There are currently eight (8) different games to choose from, and each one offers a unique gameplay experience than usual games in its category. CodeWord blends components of guess-the-word games like Hangman with...

Philip Lenssen was very kind to send word that he has a brand new game added to his collection of Games for the Brain. LetterMaze is a sesquipedalian game in which the player first memorizes the spelling of two long words. Next, a maze is presented within which the mouse is used to simply touch spell the words within the time limit. The game is ...

From Carnegie Mellon University comes this multiplayer game that is simply called: The ESP Game. The game requires you to register and sign in, and then it pairs you up with an anonymous partner for a round of ten images. You have two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30) with which to agree...

Word Pads is a new action word game done in Flash with a tropical theme. Similar to games like WEBoggle, except played as a single-player experience, the object of Word Pads is to form English words to score points by clicking on the lily pads in a race against the clock. Words of 3 or more letters are safe, but words of 4 or more letters only scor...

Jumble.com has launched a play-online section that features daily Jumbles, with a new one added every day. This version of the classic puzzler adds a timer, scoring, and even a hint feature if you really get stumped. Word puzzles are a good way to keep your mind sharp, and to give your fingers a break from all those button-mashing games.

Why is this game so addictive? Is it because it's easy to find at least a couple of words? It certainly can't be because I always end up at the bottom of the scoring list. Click....