I CHECKED and I can confirm Words With Friends is a real game

Words With Friends is a Facebook game where the words aren't that important and you don’t have to play it with friends. It’s like Scrabble only with better level design and the option to wait 9 hours to take your next turn without annoying anyone. Some people will try to claim it doesn't count as a real videogame because their mum likes it, a statement that immediately confirms their mum is cooler than they are, because Words With Friends is the real deal.

Most people seem to have a similar experience when they play the game for the first time, usually because they just got their 15^th invitation and playing the game is easier the figuring out how to mute specific notifications on Facebook. They love to go in hard, proving they have read at least a book in their life, busting out a couple of six letter words across mostly blank tiles for a groovy 12 points. After a few games of getting crushed people either get incredibly salty, blaming their failure on the other players luck for being able to make better moves through luck of the draw, or they smarten up and realise the game isn't really about words at all.

I'm not sure you even need to be able to understand English to be good at this game. The benefits of technology and unlimited time to take your turn allows you plug in dozens of random combinations in advantageous situations until you find one that’s allowed. This game is not a perpetual anagram solver for literary nerds, it is a hardcore strategy game where controlling space on the board is absolutely essential. You could play “PAGING” branching off of your opponents “TONGS” for a hot 14 points, but if that “P” stretches into the top row you’re giving them a free shot at hitting a triple word score tile and losing out in the long run.

Not that you’re never awarded for the extra syllables, stretching out of the grid with a longer word to get an unchallenged triple word score tile is a great way to get a surprise advantage, a word’s value is also doubled whenever you use all seven of your letters at once. Eventually the luck of the draw is going to catch up to you though and your tiles will be replaced with letters that you have very limited options for. It creates a really interesting push/pull dynamic where you’re trying to maximise the value of your own words while limiting the options of your opponent. For example, “V” is a strong tile to have as it’s worth 5 points, but it’s also impossible to make any two letter words out of it, so playing it in a row or column that’s one space away from the edge of the board can render that space unusable. Timing this well can score you big points with zero risk of your opponent retaliating by sneaking a word in across one of the triple word score tiles.

There’s a lot of those kinds of mind games going on when you know you’re playing against someone who knows what they’re doing. When you’re left with an idle “D” on the word five spaces away from a double word score tile it taunts you, forcing you to smash every tile combination possible into the board praying that one of them works.

“Sorry! DALATE is not a valid Words With Friends word”

Well when you put it like that I feel bad for even bringing it up, but it did have the basic structure of vowels and consonants that a lot of words have so it was worth a punt. Although now that I've been playing this game for a few weeks I’m starting to appreciate the sheer amount of letter combinations that the English language doesn't acknowledge.

It is kind of bizarre that a game that deals entirely in letters feels completely disjointed from language. In Words With Friends the alphabet does not represent any form of communication, they are instead trading cards with predetermined values based on their ease of use. Pretty much everything in this game comes down to maths. You’re either figuring out the optimal use of your tiles this round, or the probability of your opponent being able to capitalise on a certain situation based on the space and the amount of tiles left in the bag. Most horrifically of all, there’s an incentive to use up all your tiles as fast as possible since the value of any you have left at the end will be deducted from your score and added to your opponents.

I wouldn't go so far as to say Words With Friends is comparable to poker, a game where you can always win regardless of what hand you’re dealt, since there are some luck based elements to it (there’s often not much you can do if you’re given a “Z” right at the end of the game for example), but it is shockingly well balanced. It’s not Scrabble as much as it’s Scrabble Championship Edition, as the design of the board, tile values and the quantities of each tile in the bag have all been adjusted for a much more interesting game where nailing the high scoring words is much more of a contest. This is a Zynga game after all, creators and distributors of the most powerful Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in the world, so it’s not surprising their numbers would be ironclad to keep those Words With Friends moves constantly rolling through your Facebook ticker. If you happen to be reading this and under the age of 18 and you’re one of those kids who constantly complains about having to do maths in school because it won’t ever be useful in real life, well good luck chump but you just bullied yourself out of billions of dollars of lunch money.

Say what you want about Zynga, but there’s some guts in taking the alphabet and attempting to balance it for competitive play. It’s remarkable how much is going on under the hood of Words With Friends, it could be mastered and played in tournaments, but instead it’s presented as something you're not supposed to really pay any attention to. You get a prompt on your phone or at work telling when it’s your turn, you poke at the screen for a couple of minutes deciding your move, and then you proceed to not engage with it for a couple more hours. This is when games are labelled (and usually demonised) as being “casual”, but in this case there’s very little difference in the game design, the deciding factor is in how it’s monetised via its integration with social media.

Not that any of that matters anyway, the “casual vs hardcore” argument is little more than the videogame equivalent of a “No Girlz Allowed” treehouse sign. Here’s all you need to know, Words With Friends takes the building blocks of our language and reimagines them as a finite resource where extorting the maximum value out of them is its core mechanic. Personally, I can’t think of anything more videogamey than that.