Whether you’re taking a quick break from work, waiting for a download to finish or an e-mail to arrive, quick-fix games are a great way to pass some time and have fun doing it.
Word Connect for Chrome fits this brief wonderfully. Part Boggle, part jewel puzzler, it’s a simple word game that’s easy to pick up and, importantly for your employer, just as easy to put down again.
Gameplay
Playing Word Connect couldn’t be easier: you get a 4×4 grid of letters and 60 seconds to find as many words in it as possible. The longer and more varied the letters used in the word, the higher the score you get.
Click and drag across letters to create a chain of words. Each letter has to be adjacent, but this does include diagonally. Words have to be spelt in the correct order.
Successful words are removed from the grid and new letters dropped in their place, this help keep things fresh.
Of course, sometimes you’re going to get stuck or stumped, often because no words can be made or there are no vowels remaining. You can buy in an entire new set of tiles by sacrificing a quarter of your score.
Word Connect runs entirely offline, in its own window and doesn’t require any permissions to install. It’s visually similar to 2048 for Chrome.
Key points:
- 60 second round makes it quick to play
- Spell as many words as possible through adjacent letters
- Free to download
Issues
The chief problem I encountered with this game is rather annoying. The drag method for creating a chain of letters often messed up, especially when trying to trigger a tile at an angle. This wastes valuable time. It would be nice if a future update added click support so that you could click each letter in sequence rather than one-click drag.
The app uses Scrabble scoring (where certain letters have certain values) and the scrabble dictionary (more than 100,000 words). It’d be great to see the variance in letter scores displayed on screen, either by showing the value on the tile or adding a key.
It would also be nice to see some alternative gameplay modes added, such as an ‘endless mode’, where you’re not frantically drawing two and three letter words at random out of sheer panic, as would some kind of score logging system.
Download Word Connect for Chrome
Word Connect is a basic, simple time waster and makes an ideal brief distraction from work or waiting. It’s entirely free and works on Chrome and Chrome OS.