Thread: WordJong (DS)

The Good
Scrabble-style mahjong is pleasantly addictive
Three different play modes, including an online battle mode
Touch-screen controls are intuitive and responsive.

The Bad
Graphics and audio are extremely plain
No one is ever online to play.

Game Details:

Considering that you can play WordJong for free at various Web sites, or for just a few bucks on your cell phone, the Nintendo DS rendition of it had better offer something beyond portability to justify the $20 price tag. The good news is, it does. In addition to packaging two of the most popular variations of this addictive brain teaser together on a single cartridge, Destineer and Magellan Interactive have also included a battle mode that lets you test your word-making skills against live opponents using Nintendo's Wi-Fi Connect service.

If you're not already familiar with WordJong, the concept is easy enough to grasp: It's basically mahjong meets Scrabble. You're given a mountain of tiles and, starting at the top, you have to clear away the mountain a few tiles at a time. However, instead of lifting away matching pairs of tiles, you lift away tiles by forming words out of the letters printed on them. For example, if you picked up the tiles to spell "CHIMP," they'd be removed from the pile. You can't grab tiles that are boxed in or buried by other tiles, so there's some challenge involved in making words out of what you're given to work with.

One of the reasons that WordJong is so addictive is that it employs a scoring system that rewards you for stringing together complicated or lengthy words. The letter tiles are assigned point values, just like the tiles in Scrabble, and you get bonuses for words that contain uncommon letters like Z, V, or the "Qu" combination. You also earn extra points when a word is between six and nine letters (the maximum length). So, the question is, do you play it safe and go for easy four-letter words, or do you go for the big points and risk being unable to complete the puzzle because you ran out of vowels?

Over the years, WordJong has evolved into two distinct variations for Web and cellphone platforms. The Nintendo DS cartridge includes both of them. From the Web comes the daily puzzle mode, which incorporates wild tiles into the pile and rewards you with a bomb whenever you produce a word that's at least five letters long. The calendar-style menu gives you more than 700 different puzzle layouts to pick from, and each puzzle has a predefined top score that you're supposed to beat. Meanwhile, the cell phone platform's contribution is the temple challenge mode. The piles are larger and randomly generated, there are no bombs, and the wild tiles have been replaced by green multiplier tiles that really cause scores to skyrocket. Unlike the daily mode, which is just a bunch of one-offs, the temple challenge mode keeps giving you newer and tougher piles as you grow in rank, and it records your cumulative progress.

Never played this, but the review sounds good.
Will try sometime.