Two Fun, Free, Relaxing Android Games For Word Lovers

Two Fun, Free, Relaxing Android Games For Word Lovers:

I know I’m not the only one around here who loves word games. Well, today I’d like to share two free, fun Android word games. One involves a bit of fast action, while the other mainly involves looking and hunting around. Ready? Here we go!

Letter Rip

The first game I’d like to share, Letter Rip, supports Android 1.6 and up. It has a 4.0 rating with 813 reviews, which isn’t bad at all, and you’ll soon see why. Here’s what the board looks like early on in a game:

The board starts out empty, and the tiles fill in gradually, about one per second. Your job is to drag tiles around to make words. Much like Scrabble, every letter has a point value, shown as a small number on the bottom-right corner. If you don’t make words fast enough, pretty soon the board looks like this:

Meaning, it is now completely full. In the screenshot above, this happened because I simply didn’t play – I wanted to let it fill up. The game is far from over: You can still make plenty of words, and they don’t even have to be in a single line. Take this, for example:

As long as the letters are somehow next to each other, the resulting word is acceptable. Personally, I really like this – it allows for a great deal of flexibility. Gameplay is very calm, and there are no stressful timeouts. Once I found “JET” above, I cleared those spaces on the board and got my 50 points:

Now, I can drag any letter from the top row into the empty space, and I can also move other letters around. Let’s do this in two steps: First, let’s use the free space to shuffle things around a bit.

With this shuffle, I just made a new word, “WISH”, without using any of the letters above. With a quick swipe through those letters, I can claim it, earn my points, and clear those tiles.

Now I’d like to use the letters from the top bank, to make a new word:

Can you guess what word I made? I would not usually do this so early, but it shows what the top tray is for. Note that after I empty it out, it does not magically refill – you’d best save those letters for when you really need them.

After a while, it looks like all of your options are out:

Not much to do without vowels. Now, you can either surrender, or buy new letters:

Buying letters looks like this:

Again, this is another very relaxing part of the game. You don’t buy random letters in hope you’ll get something good. You actually get to pick and choose the letters you want, and pay their price with the points you’ve accumulated so far. Of course, not all letters cost the same (just as not all letters are worth the same amount of points when used in a word).

Last but not least, I’d like to show you the generous options screen:

As you can see, you get to control the board size, game speed, and even the minimum amount of letters that count as a word.

I really like Letter Rip! because I feel the designers went out of their way to create a calming game. Where in other games I would expect to have a timer, Letter Rip! just lets me keep on playing to my heart’s content. And where other games only let me create words from top to bottom or left to right, Letter Rip! doesn’t care about directions. Very enjoyable, and captures the feel of a crossword puzzle while providing something you can’t do with paper (move letters around).

Word Search

The second game I’d like to share with you is called Word Search, and it also runs on Android 1.6 and above. It’s a much simpler game, really:

What you see is what you get; it’s a large grid of letters, in which you have to hunt for the words listed. Once you find a word, just draw a line through it, and it becomes highlighted. It’s an extremely simple game, but is also nice and relaxed. I only wish there was a way to hide the list of words. As it is, the game doesn’t involve much thought, but mainly looking and hunting around for those words. That’s also a mental skill, however.

My other feature request would be a way to make the board dark. This could be a great game to play at night right before I fall asleep, but the bright white board makes that impossible.

Every time you start a new Word Search game, you get a different grid with different words. You can swipe the list of words left to right – you don’t have to stick to the order they are listed, of course.

There’s not much else to say about this extremely simple Android word game, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun. If you like words, take it for a spin!

Your Turn

As usual, this is the spot where I ask you if I missed your favorite Android word game. I don’t mean Words with Friends; can you surprise me with an awesome free word game that not many people know yet? Tell me below!

Image Credit: ShutterStock

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