Why Play Words With Friends? 5 Good Reasons
Adapted from Getty Images
Why play Words With Friends? We have five good reasons. Dig in.
1. Competition
Want to get good? Scrabble, even competitive Scrabble with clubs and rankings, has geographic limits unless you’ve got a Learjet in your yard. Words With Friends gives you a non-negligible proportion of the entire internet to play against. Someone will always be looking for a game. Odds are good that someone close to your skill level will always be looking for a game. That’s how you master a game. Well, that and some help from WordFinder’s ever-reliable Words With Friends cheat tool.
2. Improvisation
Scrabble, or any other game without digital bits, has an unavoidable limitation. All you have to work with is the information in the box and the knowledge of the people in the room. The internet hive mind is not invited. Words With Friends has the hive mind built in. Quite literally everything there is to know about the game is built into its little robot referee.
Where Scrabble or crosswords or word jumbles are limited to what happens to be in your head at any moment, Words With Friends lets you improvise, try new things, find new words and their meanings. That doesn’t just make you better at games. It makes you better at everything. To prep your head, have a look at WordFinder’s curated word lists on the website. They’re rich in word oddities suited to any good word game, and each is built from the ground up for gamers like you.
3. Strategy
The thing about the little robot referee is that it’s a really good little robot referee. It keeps things fair. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes: the race is not to the swift, nor the word game to the person who has most recently binge-read the Complete Shakespeare.
In a game of Words With Friends, each player knows every possible play they can make, because they can unscramble letters to try every possible play and see if it’s legal before they hit submit. That adds a level of deep strategy — I play here, because then he can’t go there, which would block that, so on my next turn… — that few other games, let alone word games, can beat.
4. Networking
Scrabble and other wood-and-cardboard board games let you get your real friends and family around a real table and play. It’s beautiful, a Norman Rockwell painting made real. Not Words With Friends. Not that you can’t play Words With Friends around a table with your family. You can. You can also play it with a perfect stranger in a different hemisphere. That’s beautiful in a way that Norman never saw coming.
5. Mobility
The simplest, most important reason to digitize a board game: no board, no fiddly pieces. Even if you’re playing somebody from across the street rather than across the world, you can each take turns and send messages on your own time, whether you’re at home, in line at the store, or on a plane.
Play On
Obviously, Words With Friends isn’t the Best Game Ever, on account of there isn’t a Best Game Ever. It’s not even automatically better than Scrabble or other wood-and-paper games. There’s reasons to love Scrabble too. The big difference is, for Words With Friends, it’s any time, any place — from five minutes in your work cubicle to an hour before bed. Words With Friends also improves your vocabulary, cranks up your strategic nous, and connects you with people all over the world. Beat that with a stick.
Matt Salter has been a professional writer for over 10 years. He is a gaming and technology expert, and world-class word nerd.
