Boredworkers.com

Last week, WL and I were fooling around with Simon’s Palm. In it was installed a game called Bookworm. We had quite a bit of fun playing it. While Simon said it was only on the Palm, I was quite sure that I had seen it for Windows as well. And that leads us to the game of the week, Bookworm Deluxe by Popcap Games.

Bookworm, as the name may suggest is a word-game. It reminds me alot of where the objective of the game is to create as many words as possible from a set grid of letters. Words are formed by stringing the characters together. You can snake through the board in any direction so long as the next character has not been used and is touching the last character block in your word.

The board in bookworm consists of a grid of squares. Each square on the board touches six other squares, one at the top and bottom each and two on either sides, forming a hexagon of sorts. You can start with any character on the board and connect them in any of the six directions, looping back if you have to. Each word that you form must be at least three characters long. That means you need to string together at least three character blocks. The only exception to this rule is the ‘Qu’ character block which counts as two characters.

There are two game modes available, Classic Game and Action Game.

In classic mode, you can take your time to form the words. There is no timer involved and you can play the game at a leisurely pace. During game play, several different yellow, green, and blue coloured tiles will appear depending on the last word that you played. These power tiles will increase the total points that you gain when used to form a word. In addition to these, a red fire tile may also appear. The fire tiles will burn through the tile below it with every move. When the fire burns through the last tile in the stack, the game is over.

In action mode, the game is a lot more frantic, as burning tiles will appear after a certain amount of time has passed, regardless of whether you’ve played a word or not. Similarly, after some time has passed, the fire tile will burn through the next tile. Like classic mode, when the flaming tile reaches the bottom of the stack, the game is over. Since the burning tiles appear whether you make a move or not, it speeds up the game considerably as you scramble to string words together to clear them.

In both game modes, there are different levels that can be attained. To move to the next level, a fixed number of points needs to be earned. In addition to the power tiles, there is also a bonus word that appears at the bottom of the screen. If you manage to string together the word, it will gain you a hefty bonus that will bring you closer to the next level. Finally, if you observe the tiles carefully, some tiles have dots on them. Tiles with more dots (up to three) are worth more when used in a word.

If you ever get stuck and can’t think of any words, you can double click the bookworm to scramble the board. Use this sparingly though, as doing so will cause burning blocks to appear.

A cool feature about the game is that as you create words and the bookworm eats it up, it spits out the meaning of the word. So it is educational as well as fun, as you might discover words and their meanings that you never knew existed.

To help you grow your vocabulary, refer to Boredworkers.com’s Game of the Week for the recommended downloads and follow the following steps:

• Download both recommended files.
• Install Bookworm Deluxe.
• Uncompress the crack archive.
• Copy the contents of the ‘crack’ folder (Bookworm.exe) to the game installation folder.
• Startup Bookworm Deluxe and have fun.

So now you know, fire up the game, rear your worm and go gobble up some words.

Disclaimer:
The author does not condone piracy. If you find that you enjoy the game after playing it for a bit, do purchase the license. Good work should be given its due.