Scrabble® GO - New Word Game 9+

This is a great app! You can treat it in any way that you like. You can play classic Scrabble or you can choose to play any one of about a dozen different variations. Scrabble Go itself is the main game I play and it is played much like classic scrabble EXCEPT that, for a price ( in “gems “, which you earn as you play ), you can swap letters without penalty ( very useful), have a “boost” play a word for you (these word scores are rather low so I almost never use this boost), or be shown the location (but not the letters) of every possible word - useful especially towards the end of the game. I also love Duels - a quick timed game against another person, and Rush, where you play on your own and have 3 minutes and 10 turns to score as high as possible. If you’re tired, there’s an easy option in Word Search; if you really feel like a challenge there’s Puzzle Path - a series of increasingly challenging games where you have to achieve a certain score in a set number of shots. Besides being fun and challenging, Scrabble Go has really improved my strategy and vocabulary and made me a much better Scrabble player. I definitely recommend it for clever people.

Worse in most ways that matter, but better in some ways that don’t. 1) I don’t like that the board is now so SMALL! Why do I need to see the back of the other player’s tiles, at the expense of the size of the playing board? 2) You used to be able to see ALL the current games on the ONE screen as you played, with time of last move, current turn, scores etc. You could manage multiple plays at once, from the same screen. That’s gone. 3) You used to be able to form and test out words during the other player’s turn, to see whether all the words would be accepted; now you have to wait for their entire turn to finish before you try this, then waste their time and make them wait while you do so! 4) After every turn you have to click again to get back to the game because it offers you, after EVERY MOVE, all this other stuff. 5) You used to be able to try out words in a dictionary BEFORE playing them. That’s gone. 6) A 2-letter word list used to be one swipe away. Now it’s gone too. 7) Starting play now takes 30 seconds from opening the app, as well as extra clicks. 8) On starting up the app, you have to say every time if you don’t wish to log into Facebook, which is annoying... can’t this be set either way as a default via Settings?
The rest is pretty minor, though I personally dislike the whole look of the app (lurid neon colors, kooky characters, etc). It would be good to be able to customise the aesthetics.

I have enjoyed playing this game as there are many options and levels of play. However, I can never seem to win unless I play an easy level. The opponent always seems to have better tiles and gets unbelievable scores. This gets a bit annoying after a while and play becomes BORING. The main issue I have is the endless advertisements that interrupt play and are so hard to escape from. They seem to be on an endless loop. I can handle a couple of ads but when you can “bake a cake” while waiting for the ads to end that is frustrating. It also makes you lose the thread of play. I do realise that you can pay to remove ads but there are just too many compared to other games that I play. Actually this really spoils the game play.