Today we take a look at and review the new iOS game called Towers – The Tile Stacking Word Game, that plays very similarly to online Scrabble except with a twist, you can stack letters on top of each other. This means that for existing words on the board such as “Sit”, you can stack the letter ‘a’ on top of the ‘i’ to make “Sat”. This is an online game that requires an online connection and an account to play the game. You can either sign in or if you don’t have an account then you can create one, you have an account and sign in before you can play.
Once you finally make an account, the first screen you see is the main menu screen. From here you can either create a new game, review games where you’re waiting for your opponent’s turn, or read the rules on how to play. The obvious choice if you want to jump into playing the game right away is to create a new game.
When you create a new game you can either enter a username of someone you want to place against, or go to the Game Lobby to find a list of the latest people who want to play. The only way to get your name placed into the lobby is to tap on the “Add me to Game Lobby” button which adds your name to the game lobby. There’s only a limited number of names that can show up in the lobby at a time, so when your name shows up, the list updates and the last name on the list gets removed.
Once you finally find someone to play with, you can then start playing the game. It’s a game very similar to scrabble, you have to place tiles on the board with letters in order to gain points when you make words. Each letter tile has a number on the bottom right corner and you get that number of points per tile that you play. If you land on a special colored tile, you can double, triple, or even quadruple the amount of points that you can earn.
The goal of the game is to earn more points than your opponent. The best way to do that is to play high scoring letter tiles and matching it up with the multiplication tiles to gain bonus points. In screenshot of the game above, I’m leading by 44 points against my opponent by playing high scoring letter tiles and matching it up correctly with the multiplication tiles. You can also place tiles on top of each other, so if someone has the word “Go” and you have the letter “N”, you can place the letter “N” on top of the “G” and you can create the word “No”.
Some extra features that are included in the gameplay is that you can use the game’s own dictionary to determine whether the word you’re thinking about is a real word or not. You can also chat with your opponent, although I have yet to get a reply. There’s also the point graph you can view to see how well you’re earning points, and you can also swap out any letter tiles that you don’t need and swap it with random tiles from the deck.
One weakness of the game is that on a iPhone, iPod, or other small handheld device, the tiles and buttons on the gameplay screen too small to tap with ease, most of the time you have to resort to tapping the screen with a small part of your finger in order to drag the letters into place, which might be a hassle for some people. Another weakness is that there’s no sound or music in the game. It doesn’t feel as engaging as it could be if there were sounds or clicks when the tiles would be set in place. Other than that the game is fun to play and very engaging.
Overall Towers is a fun to play game to play available on all iOS devices with iOS versions 4.3 or later. It’s recommended that you have a fast Internet connection such as Wifi while playing the game, as an Internet connection is required and might improve your gaming performance.
