Letterpress
Letterpress is an game that, if you have an iOS device and are a reasonable person, you are either playing already or should be.
The work of Loren Brichter, whose Tweetie client gave the world pull-to-refresh before Twitter bought and disembowelled it, it's a game with simple rules and surprising depth. The implementation is delightful, with a clean presentation and charismatic interface interactions. It's like we only found out now that Words with Friends was the evil twin (aside: I expect Zynga are ripping off Letterpress as we speak, probably missing the whole point in the process). The base application is free and uncrippled, but the one-time IAP to buy more features and unlimited simultaneous games is a no-brainer at 69p.
Letterpress is a turn-based two-player game played on a randomised 5x5 grid of letter tiles. Each player makes a word from any of the tiles on the board (adjacency isn't required, this isn't Boggle), which flips the tiles to their colour. The next player then does the same, flipping the same or new tiles to their own colour. The game ends when all tiles have a colour, and the winner is the player with the most.
The genius of Letterpress is in its perfect balance between vocabulary skill and tactics. When the game first came out a couple of weeks ago, players seemed to concentrate on making long words, but as people grow more familiar with the game and analyse their wins and losses, this is gradually shifting to a play style equally focused on territorial control.
See, there's an additional rule to the game, and it's an important one: if a tile, and all of its vertically and horizontally adjacent tiles, are your colour, then it is 'defended'. A defended tile can still be used by your opponent, but it can not be flipped on the next turn; it has to be undefended first, by flipping one or more of its neighbours. So it's not just a game about knowing words, it's also about trying to secure a territorial advantage.
Because it's so new, part of the fun of Letterpress is in thinking up new strategies and trying them out to see how well they work. Should you try to build territory starting from one corner, or grab and defend a group of high value letters in the middle? If there's a difficult letter like a Q, should you try to take it at the start, knowing it might not be flipped again, or leave it until the end? And because of the randomised letters, there's sufficient variation that a winning strategy in one game might not work in another—successful play is highly contextual. I think exhaustion of this game is some months away—it's deep enough to feel that I've barely scratched the surface.
Anyone fancy a game? I'm trioptimum on Game Center.
