Scramble With Friends Is A Major Disappointment

First, the positive aspects. The game is beautiful, just like Zynga’s other offerings. The Boggle-like gameplay is simple and fun. They improved upon their older Scramble game by adding the “With Friends” features. Just like Zynga’s other “With Friends” titles, you play against another opponent in a turn-based game. Connect to Facebook to play with your Facebook friends, or find your friends within the game, or simply play against a random opponent. Just like their other titles, you can chat within the games if you like, and you can turn on notifications to alert you when it’s your turn. When you start a new game, Round 1 has all the tiles worth the same amount; as you go higher, there are various bonus point tiles which add to the fun. In each round, there are three different power-ups you can add: extra time, inspiration, or shuffle. The sound effects are fun. It’s all executed quite beautifully and smoothly.

The app comes in a paid version and a free, ad-supported version. Besides the ads, the games are the same. So, what’s my problem with this game- When you start playing, you have ten “tokens”. Each round costs you one token to play. Using one power-up per game costs nothing, but if you want to use two power-ups, that’ll cost you another token. So, what happens when you use up your ten tokens- You guessed it: you have to buy more. With real money. This makes me really mad. Whether you’ve gotten the ad-supported game for free or paid three bucks for it, you have to pay to play more than ten rounds. And keep paying, and paying. This is so greedy on Zynga’s part, I don’t even have words for it. Yes, I understand the “freemium” model, the in-app purchases, etc. But usually what you’re paying for is the extras, the power-ups, the bonus features. To pay over and over and over just to keep playing the actual game is outrageous.

It’s a real shame, because this could have ended up being one of my favorite games. Don’t buy this game unless you enjoy spending lots of money. Get Boggle instead.