Wordfeud review

Wordfeud for Android doesn't even slightly resemble a certain other letter-based board game

Wordfeud
Take your vocabulary online with this word based battle app

TechRadar Verdict

Pros

  • +

    Online play

  • +

    Easy to use

  • +

    Can play multiple games at once

Cons

  • -

    Some notifications failed to push through in testing

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For starters, look at the name. Does 'Wordfeud' even sound like 'Scrabble'? Next, look at the board, randomly generated at the start of every game. Is it red and green? It's not.

Clearly, then, Wordfeud isn't Scrabble for Android, and if the lawyers want to argue, could they please wait until we've finished our current games?

Obviously, it's the same basic – cough – idea. You make words from lettered tiles and score points accordingly. However, the nature of the game is slightly different to its board-based counterpart.

It's closer to a play-by-mail game, where you make your move, then put your phone down and do something else until your opponent ruins your opportunity to get 'QUIXOTIC' with a misplaced 'TICK'.

Wordfeud uses push notifications (along with notification sounds), and offers mid-game chat, although occasionally we didn't get a notification until we fired the application up again and saw that an opponent had added a new word.

Even without these slowdowns, a simple game can easily last a whole day – at least, if your boss is around. If you can't wait that long to show off your vocabulary, you can play up to 30 games simultaneously, but that's not something we'd recommend unless you want to feel your brain leaking out of your ears.

Wordfeud's basic edition is free, and shows you an easily skippable advert at the end of every turn. Getting rid of the ads costs a one-time fee of £2.

Shamelessly firing up a Scrabble solver on the web is, as ever, a punch-worthy offence to the word gods themselves.

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