Anyway, aside from me being a bit of an arse in search of a cheap ego boost (I will never play against my partner in Pictionary), I also love Bananagrams because it’s one of those games that is basically just another game, with a very small twist. I respect that a lot, and it’s the same deal with Wurdweb, which is basically just Bananagrams, which is basically just Scrabble, which is basically a crossword puzzle (kind of). The twist with Wurdweb - which is on Apple Arcade - is that you do get a board, but you don’t get letter tiles. Instead you get whole words, and your goal is to just place a certain number, maybe fifteen, without running out. You only start with two or three, and you earn more by placing them across bonus word tiles - like the score multipliers of Scrabble. Where it departs from the board games, really, is the pacing. Wurdweb is chill. There’s no clock, no leaderboard or high scores, no competition. It’s pure puzzle, the challenges all internal, the challenge to just get a bit better at something because you want to, and so in a way it’s closest, despite the Scrabble trappings, to the original crossword after all. Just you and the board, the little haptic nudges when you put a word in place - pock-pock-pock - and a long, lazy afternoon. This is, also, the pleasure of Apple Arcade. Every game on that service, or at least every really great one, also feels like a pitch for it. It’s a game that feels good to play, unpressured and untimed, moreish - incredibly moreish - but also totally uncompulsive. It’s all about the typeface - Courier, of course - and the little characters that meander across the board. They don’t do anything, or serve any purpose. They’re just there, drifting around, because they’re just a nice little thing to have. They just make the game a nice place to be. Increasingly, that’s all I really want.
