Since the release of the first iPhone in 2007, the App Store has been a major selling point of the product.
While there are numerous application categories such as “Health & Fitness,” “Productivity”, and “Education”, the “Games” category has consistently dominated the App Store scene.
In the past, games such as “Tap Tap Revenge” and “Doodle Jump” have been notorious consistent top-sellers.
With both a free version that places an advertisement before each turn and an ad-free version available for $2.99, Zynga’s “Words with Friends” has dominated the App store charts for nearly two years.
The game is also available for the two other Apple devices that run the iOS software, and more recently for the Android platform as well.
“Words” as it is called for short by Zynga themselves, uses an imitation Scrabble™ board and calls for players to create a username which becomes their “Words” identity.
It’s the new iPhone phenomenon. To start a game, users can input a friend’s username or opt to play a game against a random (real) opponent.
The game has the option of push notifications meaning that rather than having to open the application and check the status of ongoing games periodically, a message will pop up on the users iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad screen notifying them that an opponent has made a move.
Zynga was founded in 2007 and is responsible for the addictive Facebook games “Farmville”, “Fishville”, and “Mafia Wars” among others.
However, the fierce competition of the game has even driven some players to cheat.
While websites that provide “assistance” for word games have been on the internet for years, several site and game creators took this opportunity to make a profit.
This lead to the development of the application “Cheats with Friends.” For $1.99, avid but not such “pro” players, could plug in not only their letters, but the words played up until that point to allow for maximum point achievement.
The app combines the utilization of valuable tiles as well as strategic tile placement over Double and Triple letter, as well as double and triple word spaces on the board to get cheaters over one hundred points for a single word.
