A Beginner's Guide to Playfish's Word Challenge

Playfish's Word Challenge begins with a game called the Classic mode. It's exactly like playing Boggle but on a computer. Word Challenge gives you six letters and you use them to make as many words as possible before you run out of time. You could click and drag letters into place, but since you are timed you should just type in the letters and hit enter to make a word. If you mess up, hit delete or backspace. Words must be three to six letters.

In Classic Word Challenge, you will want to focus on making four letter words and above because each time you spell a four, five or six letter word you get some time back on the clock. If you get stuck, you can hit the space key to rearrange them. After a certain amount of four letter and above words have been spelled, a yellow button just to the top left of the letters will light up. The button has the letters ABC printed on it. When the button lights up you can hit ctrl on the keyboard and get a new set of letters.

Many people believe they should spell as many words as possible with each set of letters. The actual method for success in Word Challenge is to spell as many words as quickly as possible to add more time, and hit ctrl for a new set of letters as soon as you can. One popular strategy is to memorize four letter anagrams in order to fill in four letter words and move on the the bonus round quickly. Obviously four letter words are the fastest ones to type and are therefore the fastest avenue by which to get a new set of letters. You improve at Word Challenge with practice, because after a while you will memorize which letter combinations form the same words.

If you spell a six letter word, you get a bonus round. As soon as Word Challenge indicates that you have won a bonus round, hit the ctrl key. You will also see a pink button as a reminder in the place where the yellow ABC button was. Hitting ctrl will take you to a screen on which you must unscramble the letters to spell the name of one of your friends on whichever social network you are playing Word Challenge. Sometimes you are given more letters than you need in the bonus round. The friends may or may not be friends who play Word Challenge, since authorizing the application gives Word Challenge access to your friends list.

After the bonus round you get a new set of letters and you still have the same amount of time as you did when you began the bonus round. Then Word Challenge will show you based on your score for that round whether you have the vocabulary of a baby, a hermit, a mime, a playground bully, and so on, then show you a fact about that type of individual. These titles are meant to be jokes. Word Challenge does not carry your score from game to game, but posts your highest score to date under your picture which appears at the bottom of the page.

You can pay to unlock bonus features, known as going pro, or Word Challenge will unlock them for you once you have gained 10000 coins. You gain 50 coins per day per friend playing, so it helps to invite more friends to play. As with all Playfish games, the friends you have on the social network are automatically your friends on Word Challenge.

Once you go pro, you can play practice rounds, Turbo mode or Word Grid. Turbo is just like classic Word Challenge that you have four minutes and you do not get extra time for spelling longer words. In Word Grid you have to connect adjacent letters in a grid and this time you have to use your mouse.

Word Challenge is a fun and addictive casual game. You can use it to kill time during the day or you can make it your mission to score millions of points. You can use your score to have bragging rights among your friends. Best of all, Word Challenge will actually make you smarter because you are using your brain in a new way. Kind of gives a new connotation to the phrase "all fun and games," doesn't it?