Word Up

No, that's not a reference to Gun, that Scottish rock band. It's a reference to that game you find in pub quiz machines that is by turns entertaining, annoying and mostly fiendishly addictive. Basically, it generates a grid of letters and you have to touch letters next to each other to make words. Similar to Scrabble, words using less common letters score more points. Using a Q, X, J, or Z will also gain you bonus time. The longer the word, the more points you score - so don't waste all your time going for three letter words.

As far as I can make out, the scoring is something like (add up letter points) mutliplied by the number of letters in the word. That's an approximation. I think you might also get an additional number of points equal to the number of letters in the word. My personal best word was snazzy which netted me 168 points.

It's quickly become the pub quiz game to play (although it's not technically a quiz) amongst me and my friends. Try it. You will end up wasting lots of money on it, but it's fun. Particularly if there's more than one of you. By yourself it's harder!

It's by a company called Big Fizz and I was pleasantly surprised to note they've made a PC version called Puzzle Word, although I don't know why the name change! I was less pleased that it costs £12 to buy, but back to being pleased again that they've made a time-limited demo version of it available for nowt. Anyway, I'm off to see how many points I can score.