Fun time-killer, but seems buggy – Scrivalry Review

I was enjoying this for a while — it’s like playing an unending game of Words With Friends with countless others on an infinite board. Very freeform and unstructured. But I got frustrated after a few weeks. One problem is that there seem to be somewhat frequent server problems. Another is that working on acquiring the badges for achievements was ultimately more frustrating than fun. Some of the achievements require a fair amount of planning and ingenuity, given that you only have eight tiles at any given time, and can only play tiles in one horizontal or vertical line at a time. One I did accomplish was playing a twenty-letter word, and it was geeky fun to figure out what word it could be and how it could be built up in stages forming real words at every step. And then of course there’s the slow process of making time-marking plays nearby while I wait to draw all the letters I need for the next stage of my construction. So I spent a great deal of time working out how I could build up a 5x5 solid block of letters given the game constraints. My first attempt failed on the last play because the dictionary didn’t recognize the word I needed to finish with. Argh! My second attempt did succeed, but the app did not give me credit for the achievement. Double argh! Very frustrating. It would be useful to be able to find out if a particular word were in the game’s dictionary before embarking on an achievement that requires it. Especially as one achievement involves playing a *thirty*-letter word. Does the game’s dictionary contain any thirty-letter words at all? Most unabridged dictionaries don’t, and this game’s dictionary doesn’t show a lot of evidence of being based on any unabridged dictionaries. This was a lot of fun for a while, but the glitches just got me down after a while. I hope the game improves; WWF as MUD is a cool idea.
Review by dsmarley on Scrivalry.