WordJong Daily Challenge

Lindeisha | Jan 26, 2009 Games

User rating:

(6 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

Loading ...

wordjong price

What do you get when you mix Mahjong, Scrabble and Kung Fu Panda? WordJong! Word Gamers like me will love this creation from Gameblend Studios, especially if you understand the Mahjong strategy of carefully eliminating tiles in layers so that there are none overlapping or unusable at the end. It has a cutesy feel to it with cartoon animals, flowers on the calendar where you’ve won, and even an Awards page with butterfly “trophies” to show your various word mastery accomplishments.

When you open the game, you are greeted with a serene Asian illustrated landscape and music that includes nature sounds (birds and a gentle waterfall. However, this music is on a very short loop, and has an obvious skip before it begins the loop again For me this is more like “Chinese water torture” and I like to adjust the music setting down before playing.

As a word game, WordJong is challenging enough. The characters in the game (Dragon, Rabbit, Stork, Fox, Panda, Boor and Monkey) challenge you to beat their daily score. When you begin play, you see the current month’s calendar with today’s date highlighted. On the side is a “WordJong master” challenging you to beat their high score. For example, the wise old dragon says, “My score is perfect.” His score tends to be the highest. You can keep playing the current day’s game, but cannot play the next day’s game. You can, however, scroll back on the calendar and try the previous days’ challenges.

The puzzle itself shows wooden-like letter tiles piled in a symmetrical arrangement. At the bottom is a letter rack. The first 4 spaces are clear. As you touch each letter you hear a chime and the letters go into the rack. If you make a word with 5 letters, you win a bomb. The bomb is saved for later and can be used to eliminate regular letter tiles to free the letter beneath it or to get rid of that pesky tile left over at the end. If you make words that are 6 to 9 letters long, you win a gold coin for each additional letter. Coins 6 through 8 earn 5 extra points each. The 9^th coin earns 10 extra points. Plus (as in Scrabble) some letters have more value than others. Some tiles are “wild” and some are “ice” that break when you submit a word. Fortunately, it is very easy to undo your letters and start over for each turn – one letter at a time or by clearing the rack.

On my first try, I was able to use all the letters on the board and win a flower on the calendar. Each game, though, wasn’t so easy. If you have any leftover letters and no bombs to get rid of them, you have to use your Zen-like patience to start all over again.

For such a cutesy looking game, it provides a real challenge because you have to rely both on your ability to draw on a wide vocabulary of words that are more than 4 letters long (fake words are not accepted) and a sense of strategy to use the available letters in each layer until every single letter is used to make a word (unless you have that handy bomb).

They say the brain is your biggest muscle. And what better way to practice your kung-fu skills than to exercise a combination of word-mastery, strategy and patience. Good luck, young grasshopper.