Letterpress is the latest word game craze for iPhone

If you’re a fan of word games and haven’t tried Letterpress yet, you’re missing out one of the most engaging multiplayer iPhone games. Released just a few weeks ago, Letterpress has taken the iPhone gaming world by storm. For those who are not yet familiar, it is a multiplayer game played through Game Center. It can prove instantly addicting, though, especially if you have a lot of friends already playing.

The object of the game, as in most word games, is to create words from individual letters. The letters in this game are arranged on a five-by-five grid, much like Boggle. In fact, if you see the game for the first time you might think it similar to Boggle. But it is not, other than the grid size and letter arrangement.

Players can make words using any number of letters on the board (minimum two). It doesn’t matter if the letters are in opposite corners; you can play any letter in any sequence. Make a long word, and submit it to your opponent. Your opponent then gets to try to trump your word, or at least score some semblance of points.

Along with the word-forming aspect comes a strategy aspect. When you form words in Letterpress they turn blue, while your opponents letters turn pink (but your opponent will see blue on her screen). The tiles flow back and forth as you create words. You can’t use words you’ve previously used, nor can your opponent. You can’t even make words plural (though other prefixes and suffixes might be OK). But you can block in your own tiles.

Blocking in a tile forces your opponent to use it twice in order to flip it back. The more tiles you can block in, the greater your strategic advantage.

The game is over once all the tiles have been used, or when both players skip their turns. The winner has more blue tiles than the opponent.

Perhaps the description sounds tame, even bland, but it seems that everyone who touches Letterpress becomes addicted. You can get Letterpress in the App Store for free to try for yourself. If you like it enough there’s a dollar upgrade that brings a ton of extra features.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.