Word games never get old—but some feel a lot newer than others. The Linguist: Word Craft is the latest entry in player1games’s Linguist series of letter-based noodle-scratchers, and it’s taking over our lives.
Like The Linguist before it, Word Craft is a quietly innovative and totally free word puzzler with slick presentation, hidden depths, and endlessly replayable gameplay. It looks a bit like Boggle, but it takes the format and runs with it.
Rounds are timed in Word Craft, injecting a panicky thrill of tension into proceedings, while achievements, global leaderboards, high score tracking, and daily challenges keep you coming back for more. Here’s why we think The Linguist: Word Craft is set to become your next word game obsession.
The Daily Challenges
Ever heard of Wordle? Of course you have. The primary appeal of that game, and its many imitators, is the fact that it presents you with a single daily challenge, the results of which you can quickly and easily share on social media.
Guess what. Word Craft boasts exactly the same gimmick, with a universal daily puzzle to solve in competition with, well, everybody else on planet earth. Once you’ve found the solution, you can share your work online for global gloating purposes.
The Multiplayer Features
While the daily puzzle is your only opportunity to post your score to social media directly, Word Craft gives you a ton of other chances to take on your fellow players, including the all-important online leaderboard.
As you chase high scores and bank achievements in the game your position on this global chart will rise, spurring you to do better and better.
The Constant Visual Updates
One of the ways that Word Craft keeps things fresh is through different visual themes, changed up once or twice a month to celebrate national and international holidays and the like.
For instance, at the time of writing you can keep the fires of patriotism burning with the 4th of July theme, featuring the Statue of Liberty and a flag carrying the iconic stars and stripes, billowing in the wind.
Each theme in Word Craft comes with its own hidden stickers, too, giving you some fun little Easter eggs to hunt for you as you clear the board.
The Accessible Yet Deep Gameplay
Naturally, the main reason for playing any game is the gameplay, and Word Craft serves up an experience that’s easy to learn, hard to master, and impossible to put down.
Making words in Word Craft involves tracing your finger in any direction through a random grid of letters, connecting tiles horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. But there’s a catch. Making a word only clears one layer of tiles.
To clear them all you need to keep digging, making words where you’ve already made them to remove the layers. The scoring system is highly involved, too.
For instance, every day you’ll get a set of challenge words to go after, giving you huge point boosts if you manage to find them—all the more reason to have just one more go.
To help you in your quest there are several boosts, including one that sweeps away a row of tiles, one that replaces consonants with vowels, one that lets you delete a specific tile, one that lets you shuffle the board, one that gives you extra time, and so on.
These boosts are in limited supply, however, so you’ll want to think carefully about how and when to use them if you want to maximize your score. Which you obviously do.
You can download The Linguist: Word Craft for free right now on the Google Play Store and the App Store.
