Good games for a word nerd?

April 23, 2007 5:48 PM

What are some really fun computer-based word and/or trivia games for one player? Online or desktop-based are fine.

(I did search for word games in the archives and didn't find anything, so I do apologize if this has been answered already...)

I've played PopCap's Bookworm Adventures through twice and already do an online crossword puzzle everyday. I need some new ways to have some geeky, brain-exercising fun. I am a word nerd, NOT a numbers nerd (e.g. I cannot stand Sudoku).

I love word games and general trivia as well. I like to play a quick round of something while I'm drinking my coffee in the morning and sometimes as a mental break at work or at night. Hit me with your recommendations!

posted by tastybrains to sports, hobbies, & recreation (51 answers total)

Puzzle Pirates? I've never played it, but I understand it can become quite addictive.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:54 PM on April 23, 2007

Wikipedia on "Puzzle Pirates"
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 5:58 PM on April 23, 2007

Puzzle Pirates is a multiplayer puzzle game, which doesn't sound like what you're after.

Have you tried You don't know jack? They've got lots of flash content you can try out.
posted by demiurge at 5:59 PM on April 23, 2007

No word puzzles in puzzle pirates.

Try word mojo gold on yahoo games. Very addictive.
posted by necessitas at 6:01 PM on April 23, 2007

Really light-weight but pretty addicting anagramming game:

Samarang
posted by TonyRobots at 6:01 PM on April 23, 2007

okay, this is obvious, but Scrabble. (the real thing, not that yahoo literati crap.)
posted by Tacos Are Pretty Great at 6:03 PM on April 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

I love short and sweet text games too. Text Twist and 8 Letters are both awesome and addictive word games from the equally awesome Jay is Games. You can play them for a few minutes or a few hours. Those are my two go-to games when I have a few minutes to kill. Jay is Games houses the motherlode of online games, and they review all of them. Also fun are the games at Games For the Brain - fast and challenging.
posted by iconomy at 6:04 PM on April 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Babble. I was intensely addicted to this for a while.
posted by kimdog at 6:12 PM on April 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

My friend Lobster runs Word Sandwich and Five Letter Words, both of which are worth hours upon hours of word nerdery. Not that I would know.
posted by ebee at 6:19 PM on April 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Seconding babble. Very very addictive.
posted by arha at 6:35 PM on April 23, 2007

Modesty prevents me from linking to my own MeFi Project.
Well alright, if you insist: WordMap
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:37 PM on April 23, 2007

Oh Lord, TextTwist is ridiculously addictive. For word nerds, check. One player, check. Quick rounds, check.

TextTwist-inspired puzzle: what four letters yield the most anagrams? For example, you can make three words from I, F, T and S: FIST, FITS, and SIFT. How many four-word sets can you think of? Can you do better than four?
posted by Khalad at 6:51 PM on April 23, 2007

I like WEBoggle, just online Boggle against a bunch of random strangers, but good in short little bursts. Not exactly puzzles but good for flexin the old lexicon. pots, post, opts, stop, spot
posted by jessamyn at 7:05 PM on April 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

I third TextTwist...I just found it last week and I'm totally addicted. Now, can I get it for the GameBoy?
posted by sLevi at 7:16 PM on April 23, 2007

There are a whole ton on Yahoo! Games. I've played them for hours. There's Word Racer for starters. Many are for one player but some are multi-player but can be played as single player games (that is, they're just score based).
posted by wackybrit at 7:20 PM on April 23, 2007

CRICKLER! Or via the Washington Post (registration required). Three new puzzles a day: current events, vocabulary and crossword. Help get my brain going in the morning.

Also, not exactly a game, but a word-association blog from Glark at Damn Hell Ass Kings: Who In The What Now? A new word every day, just write whatever comes to mind. Great for getting the brain moving in the morning.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 7:24 PM on April 23, 2007

The Jumble online - I always like how the suspense builds right until the terrible pun is revealed at the end. Thrilling and horrifying at the same time.
posted by imposster at 7:48 PM on April 23, 2007

I've been ridiculously addicted to Scrabulous (it's just scrabble, y'all) for a few months.

They've recently added a "blitz" game room which is basically a four minute scrabble-laced anxiety attack.
posted by redbed at 8:03 PM on April 23, 2007

pogo.com will snarf up tons of your time :)
posted by legotech at 8:05 PM on April 23, 2007

I haven't played in quite some time, but I used to really like the games on Boxerjam.

In the wordgames category, I like Flexicon and Clink.

In the trivia category, my favorites are "Know It All" and "Mindstein," but they're all pretty fun. In fact, I may go play some right now.
posted by soonertbone at 9:34 PM on April 23, 2007

Ooooh! Seconding Flexicon and Clink!! I haven't thought about either since my dial-up days on AOL. Oh, how I was addicted to those games. I wonder if they are still as addictive . . .

damn you soonertbone
posted by necessitas at 9:58 PM on April 23, 2007

pots, post, opts, stop, spot, tops
also: part, prat, rapt, tarp, trap
posted by Khalad at 6:39 AM on April 24, 2007

Let me second the recommendation for Scrabulous - it's pretty good for a java-based thing. It's not like RL Scrabble because it's timed, but it's very close.
posted by chuckdarwin at 7:38 AM on April 24, 2007

Thanks guys! So far I am really enjoying Babble. I am going to check out many of the others as time permits.

Puzzle Pirates is really great - I have gone through phases of being addicted to it - but its games are more similar to Tetris / Snood / Bejeweled. There's no word or trivia games.
posted by tastybrains at 7:49 AM on April 24, 2007

jessamyn: "I like WEBoggle" - I wrote WEBoggle

posted by Plutor at 7:51 AM on April 24, 2007 [2 favorites]

Plutor, God bless you. And God bless Evan for adding BigBoggle too.
posted by taliaferro at 8:05 AM on April 24, 2007

Games for the Brain is somewhat repetitive, but has everything from sudoku, to an entire section of word games (found by clicking on the 'word games' link at the bottom). You can play forever.
posted by flibbertigibbet at 8:36 AM on April 24, 2007

East Of The Web has great games. I love PopWord and 8-in-1.
posted by radioamy at 9:30 AM on April 24, 2007

Plutor, you rule! I love WEBogle!!!
posted by ObscureReferenceMan at 9:32 AM on April 24, 2007

Plutor: I love you too. WEBoggle helped me through many, many hours where I was supposed to be doing research...
posted by whatzit at 10:04 AM on April 24, 2007

I've played PopCap's Bookworm Adventures through twice

I just hung out this weekend with Steve Notely, who aside from Bob the Angry Flower also wrote the script for BA. You'll be happy to know the sequel is on its way.
posted by XQUZYPHYR at 10:28 AM on April 24, 2007

There's acrophobia, but I haven't seen a formal platform for it in a while. It used to be my biggest non-productive time-sink in my college days, and I believe there are still IRC groups out there playing.
posted by Cricket at 11:32 AM on April 24, 2007

The Puzzle Society is subscription-based, about $15/yr and you get 4 new crosswords of varying difficulty per day, and several that are updated weekly - also many other puzzles, sudoku, trivia, word search, etc.
posted by DandyRandy at 11:37 AM on April 24, 2007

Correction: Puzzle Society is $20/yr or $4/mo.
posted by DandyRandy at 11:38 AM on April 24, 2007

There's always Typing of the Dead, where you can combine your love of wordiness with your loathing for shambling undead brain eaters.
posted by The GoBotSodomizer at 1:04 PM on April 24, 2007

I nth Text Twist. So great.

Fun fact: "yar" is in the Text Twist dictionary, despite not being in any other dictionary I've ever seen (including the OED).
posted by danb at 1:04 PM on April 24, 2007

There's acrophobia, but I haven't seen a formal platform for it in a while.

I recently found Acrowars, which is close to the old Acrophobia game. Man, how I miss the old Acrophobia... the sound effects, the graphics, the perverted minds of the Internet...
posted by thatweirdguy2 at 3:07 PM on April 24, 2007

The desktop version leaves something to be desired, but WordWiggle (a basic Boggle clone) has a free version for Palm, which is getting a bit long in the tooth but is my go-to whenever I'm sitting around doing nothing for a few minutes.
posted by bjrubble at 3:34 PM on April 24, 2007

Yet another vote for TextTwist... I remember discovering that my freshman year in college... I think my grades suffered for it that semester, but it was soooo addictive I couldn't stop.
posted by stilly at 3:47 PM on April 24, 2007

Another vote for WeBoggle, it's been around a while now yet it's still very clean and slick, implemented entirely in Ajax.
posted by JHarris at 4:22 PM on April 24, 2007

not for one player, but i liked playing ghost
posted by lester at 5:26 PM on April 24, 2007

This is kind of a stretch, but The Atlantic Monthly's
famous Puzzler is now available only online. They are cryptic crosswords in the British style and are difficult, addictive, and incredibly satisfying if you can actually solve them.

The downside is that they are available only to subscribers to the print edition. The upside is that if you pop for the $20 or so to subscribe, you get the best magazine in America. They're both treasures.
posted by hwestiii at 7:48 PM on April 24, 2007

I like acrostics better than crosswords.
posted by brujita at 9:08 PM on April 24, 2007

My sole contribution to this thread:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/time-waster/
:)
posted by jamjammo at 12:27 AM on April 25, 2007

You could try these three:

Etymologic: “In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to solve; in each case the word or phrase is highlighted in bold, and a number of possible answers will be presented. You need to choose the correct answer to score a point for that question. Beware! The false answers will often also seem quite plausible, and some of the true answers are hard to believe, but we have documentation!”

Wordie: “Wordie lets you make lists of words -- practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. See who else has listed the same words, add citations and comments, and discuss.”

Verbotomy: “Verbotomy is about creating words. Every day we create a new definition and matching cartoon. Your challenge is to create a word -- a verboticism -- that matches the definition. After you create your verboticism, you can vote for other authors's words to help select the winning verboticism for the definition.”

Have fun!
posted by Amy NM at 5:44 AM on April 25, 2007 [1 favorite]

I agree that East of the Web is good, I do the daily cryptogram in the morning after I read the news. I like it because it lets you put in the letters to solve it very easily, and change them easily.

Also, Merriam Webster has a free daily word game, and for a subscription--I think $9.95 a year, you can get two new word games every day. Dictionary Devil is fun, Bee-Cubed is good too on their site.
posted by chocolatetiara at 9:35 AM on April 25, 2007

I just hung out this weekend with Steve Notely, who aside from Bob the Angry Flower also wrote the script for BA. You'll be happy to know the sequel is on its way.

Yessssssssssssssssssss. I love word puzzles and games, and Bookworm Adventures is the best game I have found so far. Very much looking forward to the sequel!

I wish I could add some games, but I haven't played anything that hasn't already been mentioned. Since I played through BA, I've been sticking to crosswords because nothing quite lives up to BA.
posted by geeky at 9:36 AM on April 25, 2007

I love "The Joy of Lex" just for these types of peoples.
posted by YoBananaBoy at 11:53 PM on April 29, 2007

Scrabulous is AWESOME. Thanks so much for linking. It's much better than Literati on my machine (and possibly on Firefox in general) and now I'm kind of regretting buying Scrabble a while back. I can play it offline, I guess, but ...Scrabulous is great!
posted by not_bitter at 10:45 PM on May 4, 2007

I was thinking of posting this elsewhere, but as this word games post was still on the sidebar, I figure it'll find an audience here:

NYtimes.com has a crossword puzzle this week penned by Bill Clinton.
posted by jrb223 at 9:14 PM on May 6, 2007

Scrabulous.com is the gateway drug to isc.ro
posted by lalochezia at 4:09 PM on November 30, 2007