I now have another app on my Kindle to distract me from reading: “Scrabble“, published by Electronic Arts/Hasbro and available at Amazon for $4.99 (at least here in the US). It plays just like the classic board game, and allows for you to play against the computer, solo, or with other human players (by passing the Kindle around to each player in turn).

I found the default computer opponent to be pretty easy to beat, while the the higher difficulty option gives me a good run for the money: it’s about a 50/50 toss-up as to who will win, and I’m a decent Scrabble player. Its built in dictionary of allowed words is quite extensive, perhaps a bit too extensive for my tastes. (For instance, the computer AI played the word “BRR” against me recently; and as far as I’m concerned, that is a sound effect, not a word.) A nice feature is that you can pop up a list of allowed two-letter words at any time, which is useful, since which two-letter words are “legal” can be a major bone of contention between human players.

There are short-cut keys for most of the game actions, and you use the 5-way controller to select the starting square for a word and its direction, then just type in the letters you want to use. The full game board is displayed on the screen and is quite readable, though I would have preferred it if they could have made some contrast between the background color of the normal (non-doubling/tripling) squares and the tiles, probably making the board squares a light shade of gray. Here’s a screen shot from the Amazon site:

All in all a good app, and I’d recommend it for anyone who likes Scrabble or other similar word games.