Observations on Scrabble for the iPhone.
I want to be kind to the digital manifestation of my favorite game of all time on my favorite device of all time. Everything looks sharp. Performance is crisp. The features and game modes are robust without being overbearing. I particularly enjoy the cumulative statistics and moves list. This isn’t a review, though, so I’m not going to delineate the pros and cons of spending 99¢ to have the classic word game on your phone. ((Download the free version if you want to try before you buy. It’s essentially the same but ad-supported.)) Just go get it. I could use a few qualified opponents. That said, caveat emptor. You’re about to enter a world of pain. Despite the aforementioned purchase-worthiness, Scrabble for the iPhone has a few exasperating flaws.
Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh away.
Integrating Facebook, not merely as a shortcut for player accounts (which, truthfully, would now be better served by Game Center) but as a fully-featured alternate opportunity to play the game ((Yes, I’m aware the Facebook version preceded the iPhone version. RIP Scrabulous.)) is brilliant. It expands the base of players and provides convenient access when away from the phone.
Whether due to EA’s implementation or Facebook’s API, however, staying logged in is an exercise in futility. ((I’m inclined to fault EA on this as plenty of applications use Facebook to outsource logins without issue.)) Prepare to be bewildered as time after time launching Scrabble will reveal, if it doesn’t crash first, no available games — the telltale sign you’ve been mysteriously and obnoxiously logged out. For those practicing good password hygiene it’s a particularly frustrating experience. Each new login means launching a separate password database, going through that rigamarole, returning to Scrabble, typing your email address, pasting in the password, and finally, submitting your login credentials for authorization. Facebook (helpfully?) emails you immediately to notify you that a new device has logged in. ((I have ten such emails in three days of playing.))
Speaking of notifications, the cherry on the fail sundae is the (logical) lack of push notifications while you’re logged out. Have fun playing an asynchronous, turn-based game when your phone never bothers to let you know it’s your move. The Schrödinger login flaw alone might persuade you that Words with Friends is more deserving of your money, your attention, and, critically, your word of mouth. I certainly wouldn’t blame you. ((In a slightly related but ultimately harmless vein, EA has also chosen to encourage you to pimp the application each time you best your highscore by posting it to your Facebook wall. It’s a duplicitous bit of marketing, camouflaged as the worst kind of thoughtless, self-promoting, push-button oversharing. </soapbox> ))
Design oversights, perhaps.
Compared to the Facebook login Hindenburg, the remaining UI conflagrations pale.
In the full-board view, tiles are missing point values. I suspect this is a deliberate decision intended to reduce clutter, but it’s a painful loss. Thankfully, zooming in reveals them, yet unless you’re intimately familiar with Scrabble, that’s going to result in a lot of unnecessary taps. Even those who can recite the tile values from memory ((Count me doubly impressed if you can tick off tile distributions)) will be noticeably inconvenienced. Chalk one up for Words with Friends on this point.
Superfluous dialogs. Want to view a game in which it’s not your turn? Be prepared to be assaulted by a warning that it’s not actually your turn. Every time. Want to jump from the current game to another? The only list is in the main menu, which wouldn’t be so bad if accessing the main menu was a one-tap affair from within a game. The good news is, that’s pretty much it. The bad news is you’ll hit those frequently enough to notice. Once you do, well, sorry for Goldbluming you. ((I wanted to add a section here entitled “Egregious animations” for the frequent, tedious screen gyrations for scoring plays and shuffling tiles, but, I suppose, spartan interface is a personal preference to some degree. To each his own.))
Don’t bother re-arranging those tiles. It should go without saying that re-arranging the tiles on your rack is half the battle in forming successful plays. That Scrabble on the iPhone abandons all pretense of re-arranging the tiles as you move them is a staggering failure, especially in light (yes, again) Words with Friends’ excellence in the identical area. In Scrabble, dragging a tile across the rack has no effect on the other tiles. Dropping it will snap everything into their new, updated locations — most of the time. Miss by a few pixels though and the dragged tile will simply revert to its original position, leaving you berating the UI rather than playing the game. Words with Friends, on the other hand, smoothly juggles the rack as you pass the designated tile across, providing constant and immediate feedback each step of the way. It’s a luxurious experience when contrasted with Scrabble’s feckless disinterest in even making the attempt.
Scrabble with Friends
If the situation were reversed, if Words with Friends was the original and Scrabble the clone, I suspect I’d have difficulty selecting EA’s offering despite its merit. It’s snappy, slick, and clever in all the ways Words with Friends isn’t. Its Facebook integration enables games with friends (ha) I’d be otherwise unable to engage.
Conversely, Words with Friends can on occasion feel slow, it exhibits surprising bugs, and overall exudes a crude amateurism in contrast to Scrabble’s sophistication. Frankly, it’s a toss-up. For now, I’m tipping the scales in Scrabble’s direction thanks to an as yet unrevealed ace: balance. The Words with Friends board is overpowered. There are too many word multipliers and many letters have higher point values, enabling luck and randomness to outweigh skill. Similarly, Scrabble’s 50 point bingos reward wordsmithing to a greater degree than does the comparatively paltry 35 allotted by Words with Friends.
Executive summary: if EA doesn’t address the login situation in Scrabble, it’s going to be difficult to justify the dog and pony show necessary merely to play. All the gloss and thoughtfulness means nothing when confronted with repeated blockades each time the app is launched. I therefore find myself frustrated; yet, I am, until further notice, a Scrabble man. I wish I could be optimistic that EA was on the ball.
NavyWings
And here I was looking for a perfect way to say it. Outstanding. You captured all the same irritants I have with the scrabble app. The login issue is enough to make me want to abandon it period. Like you, I’ve used both as well. I started out with Words with Friends and switched to Scrabble for the reasons you mentions thinking it should be the better app. In this case, there is no better app. They both have their annoying flaws.
Another irritating issue you missed is, if it is not your turn and you’re viewing the board, you can’t zoom in. So if you’re planning that great next move and want to zoom in to see the tile point value, you better have another resource for looking up tile point values because it aint happening on the board.
These should be 1st year computer science major fixes and yet the common sense about it seems to be elluding EA.
Joel
Very good article. Hopefully someone reads it that can save us all. Sometimes I wonder if the developers even play the game. The Login debacle stirs something within akin to hatred towards EA. Scrabble has a special place in my heart and therefore my love for it is immutable and instead I see EA as the evil corporate entity responsible for at least a small bit of utter half-assedness that bedevils humanity.
Also, I’d like to throw my tiles on the board to play with different word configs when it isn’t my turn.
Nate
@Joel — Agreed. I’m nearly at my wits’ end with the login issue. It’s so frustrating I consider deleting the app every day. It’s amazing how one issue can destroy an otherwise compelling experience.
Jo
Easily the most frustrating app I have on my iPhone. Constantly crashing, kicking me out of FB login, some times making me login to FB, sometimes showing me the dialog and then ‘remembering’ all of a sudden I was logged in.
I’m in an abusive relationship, and its with an iPhone app for goodness sake.
Jeremy
Accurate commentary. The only advantage iPhone Scrabble has over Words with Friends is that when I play the latter, I never know to which word its “Sorry, that is not an acceptable word” message is referring, whereas it is straightforward in Scrabble. Other than that, Scrabble is very frustrating with its constant crashes and logoffs. Ridiculous!
Angelo
Great article. I might add, however, that even more annoying than the login issue is when the “connection lost” dialogue pops up. When I play on the subway, it will come up repeatedly, interrupting my game vs. the cpu. It just won’t stop!
Geert Bosch
On the positive side, graphically, the game looks nice. Single-player (local) mode is OK. I like the teacher, both for single user and networked games. It does teach really me, though it also is a distinct advantage for future moves. It’s really nice to know you’ve found the highest scoring word. Together with unlimited, penalty-free dictionary lookups and generous time allotments, however, this modern-day networked version is very different from the classic physical board game with hour glass. Hours long puzzling with extensive dictionary usage will be rewarded.
In computer science terms, electronic Scrabble is more like an off-line (non-interactive, batch processed) game, while the physical variant is more like an online (interactive, real time) game. How twisted!
Unfortunately, Scrabble crashes often and drains batteries. Even if it doesn’t crash completely, it is common to get a “something went wrong” message. It seems to need to establish elaborate web connections / logins for any action in the game, or even when there has been no action at all. That is just stupid. All information about a player’s move could even be embedded in the payload of the push notification. All data about new moves could be communicated in two packets: one from phone to server (these are the game id’s I have, with these numbers for last move), and one from server to phone (giving new moves for each game). Once Scrabble knows its my turn for some game, it should be able to just remember that fact and let me prepare my next move. Sure, it can only be really played once connectivity is re-established, but there shouldn’t be anything holding me from preparing all my next moves while in the train back home from work, right? After all, Scrabble is a simple game, where a few hundred bytes are enough to describe the entire game history.
Yet, just getting a quick update of the status of active games takes a long time (dozens of seconds) and is flaky, even on a fast connection. There is no excuse for this! Then, even after finally the status of all games is updated, you still can’t just view the board of a particular game and prepare your next move without another elaborate series of network communications. Basically, you can do nothing if you’re offline.
Isn’t the whole point of turn-based games that you just have periodic communication and can prepare your next move while offline? This Scrabble implementation just doesn’t get it. It is like chess-by-mail where you can only look at the chessboard while the postman is in front of your door. It’s stupid and doesn’t work.
There are some other misfeatures as well. If you try to play this game in a typically NYC subway, you’ll find your letters getting scrambled regularly, just because your not keeping still enough. That is, if you’re lucky enough to be able to view the game board to start with.
Then they re-implemented the iPhone text input box for the dictionary, but did so poorly. As a result there is no magnifying glass for repositioning the cursor. Did I mention that dictionary lookup requires (lengthy) network communication? This is even though there is a dictionary for local games. For the “official” Scrabble game, I’d expect it to have the official dictionaries handy locally and use those. If there are updates, communicate those (small) ones over the internet once and be done with it.
So, given all these complaints, why do I still play it? I like the game itself. I don’t want some reinvention with different scoring etc, but just the classic game. Electronic Arts should be able to do better than this half-baked excuse of a game.
If only the protocol was open to communicate with Facebook scrabble games, I could do a proper implementation myself. Unfortunately we’re in the situation that the “owner” of the game doesn’t condone third-party implementations, while the first-party ones are subpar.
-Geert
Linard-5
Ea scrabble has very poor dictionary,many words missing