A-R-G-H. Nothing but V-O-W-E-L-S.
Welcome to the fun, and frustration, of Words With Friends.
Think Scrabble for the social-media age. Words With Friends is a highly addictive puzzle of a game that can be played on your computer, via Facebook, or smartphone or tablet.
Unlike FarmVille or Mafia Wars, both part of the Zynga stable of similarly compelling little computer creations, WWF encourages players to build strong vocabularies.
And as the "Friends" part of the title implies, players are encouraged to chat with each other as they suss out the best use of an inconveniently placed "Triple Word" space on the board.
You can play with friends, as its title implies, but you can also pick up an online challenge against strangers.
The game has caught on across generations -- with high-school and college students, office workers, grandparents. Celebrities expressing love for WWF include singer John Mayer, actress Eliza Dushku, actor Alec Baldwin and football player Terrell Owens.
"I've worked on games for 20 years ... but I've never experienced anything like this," said Paul Bettner, general manager of Zynga With Friends.
"Wearing a Words With Friends T-shirt makes you an instant celebrity," he said. "People stop you on the street just to tell you how much they love the game. It's intense."
Bettner and his brother, David, created their own company, Newtoy, in September 2008, and soon came out with Chess With Friends.
Zynga acquired Newtoy in December 2010 and a Facebook version became available in August. There is a free app that has advertising, and the premium app sells for $2.99.
Although the company will not officially confirm sales figures, the tech world's general consensus puts downloads of both the paid and free apps somewhere north of 10 million.
"I started out years ago with Literati (a similar game) on Yahoo!" said Carol Washburn, 57, who works at the University of Pittsburgh. "I loved that; I'd been playing for years."
But when WWF came along with its convenience across mobile devices and a more streamlined playing experience, Washburn was quick to try that as well. Throw in online Scrabble, she said, and she's probably playing 30 games at any time.
But never at work, she added, laughing.
The social-networking aspect of WWF lends itself to the creation of etiquette dos and don'ts -- imagine something written by Miss Manners by way of Max Headroom.
Because games can last days -- you might play a word and not hear back from your opponents for eight or 12 hours -- there is ample opportunity for cheating. WWF uses "ENABLE," or Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon. More than 173,000 acceptable words are programmed, including some strange, but valuable, two-letter variations, such as "Qa" and "Xi."
There are online sites such as Wordsolver.net and Lexicalwordfinder.com that can help in a pinch, but heaven help anyone who gets caught. And, really, are you that desperate?
Apparently so. One popular free app, EZWordCheats, has been downloaded more than 7,000 times.
Good players regularly can score more than 400 points, and they know that it isn't about the number of letters used but the placement.
There are two constants in the online chatter of WWF players. The first is the constant search for games: "Play me! My name is (fill in the handle)."
The second: in posting, proper grammar and spelling counts. A few times, "loser" was spelled "looser," which was met with a sort of genteel derision. Worse, however, was the time someone wrote "rediculous."
As one replied, "How can people play WORDS with Friends when they cannot spell WORDS?"
If playing a game or 15 against your friends is good, then the idea of a WWF tournament is great. It's the kind of competition that can be organized via email or Twitter, soliciting players from fan sites that range from a high-school newspaper in Florida to fans of former "American Idol" David Cook.
The most high-profile competition was staged by D magazine in Dallas; the Bettners are from Texas. The brothers participated, as well as members of the Zynga team, an opera singer and a professional football player.
It was won by Chris Cree, 55, of Dallas, the co-president of the National Scrabble Players Association. In the final, he defeated Trennis Jones, 28, a sports agent from Austin, Texas.
The latter's bio included: "He has lost many relationships due to obsession with Words With Friends."
(Contact Maria Sciullo at msciullo(at)post-gazette.com.)
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