LetterPress Review – Addicting, addicting!

Our rating:

By: AteBits

Version #: 1.0

Date Released: 2012-10-24

Developer: AteBits

Price: Free

User Rating:

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Loren Brichter is best known for his successful Twitter app for the iPhone Tweetie, which was purchased by Twitter to become the official app. Since then He has been busy in his laboratory, cooking up a new app that is very different, but in someways the same as his original hit. Letterpress is a word that blends strategy and area control with boggle-like word searching.

I personally detest word games. I find them frustrating to play, and most are simply a comparison of each players vocabulary. With Letterpress, the game is more than just finding words in that alphabet soup. While using larger words can be advantageous, it is the timing and position of the letters used that plays a bigger role is your success at the game.

Letterpress presents the players with a sixteen letters in a 4×4 grid. On your turn, you must contract words with the letters. The letters you use turn your color and if you use a letter of the other players color it is turned to yours. This back and forth goes on until all the letters are turned to a color. The person with the most letters wins. The twist in this game is that letters can be defended by surrounding them with letters of your color. These letters are denoted by a darker shade, and while your opponent can use these letters in words, they will not turn their color.

So Letterpress is more of an area control game, than a scoring word game. The player’s scores rise and dip with each turn as they jockey for position. Games must be played through Gamecenter, and there is no offline pass-and-play. Another feature I would like to see is a chat so you can taunt congratulate your opponent on a while played word. These issues are minor when compared to the gesture based controls, and playful animations that make Letterpress a simple to understand, but challenging to master, game. The best part of Letterpress is its ease of entry. It is free to play, but for a $.99 in app purchase, you can play more than two games at a time and see all the previously used words. This game is going to a contender for game of the year, so don’t miss it.