This is madness? This...is...Scrabble!

Scrabble has seen a lot of press lately thanks to the showdown over Facebook’s Scrabulous application. Whatever you think of that legal brouhaha, one thing is certain: folks love their Scrabble. Now iPhone and iPod touch users can join in the fun with a new, lawyer-approved take on the venerable board game.

Scrabble offers several ways to play: a slightly pointless Solo mode, a Pass 'n Play mode in which you can challenge up to three other players by swapping your device each turn, or you can simply play against the computer at three levels of difficulty. Each mode lets you play to a certain number of points or rounds, or you can play a Classic game to the last tile for the highest possible score. Scrabble’s optional Duplicate mode forces all players to share the same set of tiles, and only the highest-scoring words remain on the board. If options aren’t your thing, tapping Quick Play fires up a plain old Classic game against the computer. Scrabble also offers excellent in-game documentation that covers everything from rules to letter distribution.

Whichever mode you choose, the game plays as you’d expect. You can zoom in on the board with a pinch or a double tap, scroll around by dragging a finger across the screen, and drag and drop tiles with ease. We found that the game can get confused if you don’t leave a pause between scrolling and selecting a tile, however. During your turn, you can easily exchange tiles, shuffle your current tiles with a tap (or a shake of your device) and remove tiles you just placed on the board one at a time or all together. The Best Word feature unleashes a tactical nuclear dictionary on your opponent: the computer selects your most valuable letters and spells the highest-scoring word possible, but you can only use the feature four times in a single game.