Words with Friends, the social word game that rose to stardom when it first debuted in 2009, gets a major update. It's so major, in fact, that the update gets its own standalone app: New Words with Friends.
To celebrate five years of yellow-tiled word play by millions of users around the globe, Zynga's New Words with Friends incorporates a host of whole new features most frequently requested by the die-hard fans of Words with Friends, plus a simplified and more modern design befitting a mobile app in 2014. The game board remains pretty much the same, as Zynga's general manager for Words with Friends Vaibhav Sahgal says the company doesn't want to alienate long-time users. The interface is now easier to navigate, and the new features make for better gameplay.
"We're proud to deliver a vastly enhanced playing experience with New Words with Friends that offers the same entertaining word game players have loved for the past five years with an abundance of new features that players have asked for," says Zynga vice president of games Jonathan Knight in a statement.
Prominent among these features is a single-player mode called Solo Play, the most requested feature that allows players to play without an Internet connection, so players can practice their word skills while they're on an hours-long flight or waiting for friends.
"This is really huge for us," says Sahgal. "It's been requested by our players for a long time."
But while New Words with Friends now allows for a less social experience, it has also, on the other hand, enhanced the social side of the game with bigger profile pictures and Community Match, a feature that allows them to choose an opponent based on the stats on their profile or even on how good-looking they are in their profile pictures. Or players can also let the app automatically choose a good match for them based on their stats.
"Our users love stats," says Sahgal. "They love competing with others but they also like competing with themselves. They like seeing how they're progressing in the game and how they're getting better."
To help players become even better at their game, Zynga included a new in-app dictionary powered by Dictionary.com, which allows players to check the definition and pronunciation of 170,000 words. They can also look up how many players have played a certain word. The dictionary also includes a new Word of the Day to help expand players' vocabularies.
Words with Friends is Zynga's most popular free game on Apple's App Store and ranks high in Google's Play Store. More than 7.5 billion minutes are played on the app every month and, since day one, more than 58 billion words have been played.
Users can download New Words with Friends for iOS and Android for free, and Android users can sign in using their Google+ or Facebook accounts.
