As someone who makes his living out of the manipulation and presentation of words, you’d think that I would be able to beat an iPhone app in a letters game. Think again. Lettro Challenges, the new game from the French family start-up YA QU A, proved a decent competitor in our race to uncover the longest words in the quickest time.
As an avid fan of word games, I jumped at the opportunity to review Lettro Challenges, thinking that my prowess on the Scrabble board would stand me in good stead; however, the app has a few tricks up its sleeve and, despite a promising start, I soon ran out of lives. This didn’t deter me, however, and after sharing the app on Facebook I was back in the running with an extra life.
The crux of the game is simple; drag your finger across three or more adjoining letters to make a word before the app takes its turn; once you’ve highlighted letters they belong to you, but the app can steal them during the course of its turn. The player with the most highlighted letters at the end is the winner of the match. You either progress to the next level or play the round again, armed with the knowledge of where the best words are.
There are clues along the way; pressing the book symbol reveals the longest word in the puzzle and you can use this to secure a victory (obviously there are only a few of these boosters available to you before you have to purchase more). The levels change in terms of the layout of the word blocks and things get a little trickier when there are more letters to choose from.
The app is free but once you run out of lives, you’ll need to purchase more; get five more for $0.99. However, if you have patience, you can wait 20 minutes and you will get one extra life to continue your challenge.
Adverts pop up every now and again but not enough to be annoying; for a free app, this is really worth keeping on your phone for those little gaps when you want to kill time in an intellectual way, rather than just blowing monsters off the screen.
