Quarrel Is Secret Best Word Game, Coming To XBLA Soon, PSN Eventually

Whether we're talking Scrabble, Boggle, or Hanging With Friends, I have an unhealthy (if happy) obsession with word games. Perhaps it's just the writer in me, but I can't get enough of games that involve playing with letters to create high point-scoring words. This year at E3, I discovered what has quickly become my favorite word game, and it's now finally available on iPhone and iPad and coming to other downloadable services soon.

Quarrel, a new downloadable game from Ignition, is most easily described as lovechild of Scrabble and Risk. It works like this: You pick a map to play on. That map is split up into a bunch of territories that are then divided evenly between the number of players. Each territory is populated by members of your personal army, which you can customize to be robots, zombies, pirates, or a myriad of other strange soldiers.

If this all sounds more like a turn-based strategy title than a word game so far, bear with me. Here's where it gets good: When you choose to attack an opponent's territory, victory isn't determined by some abstract stat or who has the biggest army. Rather, you're placed into a word battle. An eight-letter scramble appears on screen, with each letter having a point value, Scrabble-style.

Both players must attempt to find the highest-scoring word, but players are limited to using at most the same number of letters as they have soldiers on that territory. If you've built up a max-size army of eight, you can come up with virtually any word, including an anagram using all eight letters. If you weren't thinking strategically and left a territory with only two or three soldiers, you'll have to attempt to build a tiny word using high score letters only.

Further tactical twists are thrown into the game, such as the ability to take enemy prisoners when you pull off a successful defense of a territory. Switching between fast-paced word-searching and the slower, turn-based strategy segments feels like exercising two different parts of my brain, and it's incredibly satisfying when I'm able to do both successfully.

The only major issue that I have with the core design of Quarrel is that too many match-ups come down to timing. In the surprisingly common case that you end up with a word that is worth the same score as your opponent's, whoever entered their word fastest wins. I lost to the much quicker computer more times than I'd care to admit thanks to this rule. It's not a game-breaking annoyance by any means, but I do wish there was a more graceful and interesting solution.

One more important technical problem worth pointing out: The current iPhone/iPad version of Quarrel doesn't feature multiplayer. To the game's credit, playing against the computer opponents is a lot more fun than I expected, but multiplayer is really going to be where this addictive title shines. Thankfully, it's coming in an update soon.

And for the non-Apple device-owning readers in the audience, Quarrel will also be available elsewhere soon. An Xbox Live Arcade release is planned for this fall, and PSN and Steam versions are in the works for some time after that. Whatever platform you choose to play it on, if you're a word game fanatic like I am, Quarrel should seriously be on your radar.