Idol Words Arriving on iOS This Month

Boggle with an adventure mode, Idol Words promises intense, frantic word sleuthing ‘action’.

Idol Words is created by Outplay Entertainment, who have already released ‘Word Trick‘ – a less boring version of Scrabble – and Booty Quest, a gem matching game.

So perhaps they’re not paragons of trailblazing originality, but Idol Words does include an adventure mode and nice chunky visuals to go alongside the familiar word finding gameplay.

The game also includes a flipping mechanic where, upon using every letter on your current board, the letters will all flip, essentially revealing a new board of letters for you to puzzle over mid-way through a game.

But could this undermine the purity of the Boggle design? Surely the joy of Boggle was that you and your opponent were forced to pour over an identical letter set for two minutes of your dull lives, neither having the gumption to admit that Boggle isn’t actually all that fun and that you’d much rather just play Hangman or Bop It. But Idol Words seems to present a system where we could get away with finding slews of short words on a few boards, quickly, churning through our bank of ‘the, bee, tea, go’ and what not, like some sort of academically shy anteater sloshing its tongue around a bowl of alphabetti spaghetti. The design of Boggle is fragile and this change could be calamitous! Get to the bunker!

Ok, so, it might also be a fine, speedy way to play a fun word game on the move. This is a very game-y version of the boardgame too, full of power-ups to boost your score, and online leaderboards upon which to display dominance over your friends and acquaintances, so it’ll probably be fine. We’ll see when the game launches later this month.

Idol Words will be available on iOS Devices in April 2013.