I understand that in a low budget game there isn’t always the manpower to proofread everything, and normally I wouldn’t consider it that terrible if a character in a game spoke in a text bubble that said, “You have great insticts [sic].” But when that game is called Word Jong Party, and is centered entirely on the English language, such a mistake somehow seems particularly egregious.
What You Do: Spell
Word Jong Party is essentially a hybrid of Mahjong and Scrabble. Letter tiles are piled on top of one another, and your goal is to use as many of the free letters as possible to form a word, paying particular attention to the more difficult to use letters, which give extra points. After you have spelt your word, the letters you use are removed from the pile and the next player can spell a word with whatever letters this frees up.
You can play against either computer-generated players or friends. In the game’s career mode you play against players of increasing skill with a fondness for words I’ve never heard of, like sel, pul, ars and acyl (all of which are flagged as misspellings by Microsoft Word but which dictionary.com tells me are genuine English words). In spite of your opponents’ erudition, the game’s career mode is generally quite easy, as your opponents favor 3 and 4-letter words. A boring five-letter word like “trains” gets more points than a smarty-pants Scrabble champion word like “acyl”
Presentation: A Few Kinks to Work Out
Word Jong Party is played in rounds, but oddly enough, the game’s designers don’t seem to have the same understanding of what a round is that I do. I would say that rounds are distinct units of gameplay in which there is a winner. So if there are three rounds, you might win one, and then your opponent might win one, and then you might win the third round and thus the match.
Word Jong Party does things differently. You play a “round,” and then you are told who won that round, and then you play another round in which your score begins exactly where it left off in the previous round. In other words, there are no rounds, there is just one long round with breaks for progress reports. It’s peculiar.
Multiplayer: Kind of Interesting
The most interesting part of Word Jong Party is its multiplayer mode, in which you play against friends. Each player gets their own tile board, and you can either play in rounds or play in a “frantic” mode in which you race to rack up points as quickly as possible. You can also acquire “power ups” to double a word score or shuffle your opponents’ tiles.
If you are a word junkie with some word junkie friends, you might get some enjoyment out of Word Jong Party, but you would probably have more fun just playing Scrabble. Word Jong Party is a cute idea for a game, but there’s not a lot to it. And when there’s not a lot to a game, the least you can do is get the spelling right.
