If Boggle ever got Tetris drunk and made sweet love to it while Words with Friends watched, SpellTower would be its love child.

The insanely addictive puzzler tasks you to form words out of connected letter blocks, moving up, down or diagonally, clearing columns and rows while racking up points.

Those with either great vocabularies or handy cheating programs can usually lay waste to word games, but SpellTower requires a combination of word-awareness and strategy. To be good at the game, you’ve got to make strategic plays, opening things up to make way for a giant 7-letter score.

An array of modes sit there to mock you, challenging you to score well enough to unlock others. Our favorite was Puzzle Mode, which adds another row of layers after each turn, forcing you to focus on problem areas of the grid before they reach the top and end your game.

SpellTower controls like a dream, making it easy to cancel out of ill-advised spelling attempts. Like your sister’s college roommate, it encourages experimentation, not penalizing you for being slow or ignorant. Well, Rush Mode does penalize you for being both. But you can steer away from that high-stress mode.

Even if you’re illiterate you can potentially tappity-tap your way to success. Granted, that may take you a few dozen weeks, so you’re probably best off learning some words so you can hang.

RATING: 8.5/10

SpellTower ($0.99), available on iOS platforms, was published by Zach Gage, who provided a review code. We played the game for two hours.



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