Zen Word

I got a bit tired of the word unscramble games I had been poking at in between other things lately.  A while back I switched to Zen Word, which is very similar to the others (Word Collect and Word Trip), but it just has a more relaxing vibe.  Some app was also installing games when I never asked for them.  

Zen Word boots up with a little uplifting quote, and has short 3-line poems for each new "location".  The poems are not very good ... they have a good choice of words but only a few had a decent rhythm.  It's so easy to just start writing words and forget to read them aloud to see how they sound.  If you can stick to the same number of syllables or accents per line, the result can just flow off the tongue rather than getting stuck in a bunch of extra sounds.  Others felt like they had translation issues.  But it was a nice feature, again going with the relaxing vibe.

The dictionary in Zen Word is better than the other two games.  It has full sets of Greek and Hebrew letters, some more of the common shortened words like REPO, and a few more science terms (erg and bel and such), enough archaic/regional words (like KEN and ELD), and some fantasy/mythological words (ORC and ROC), though it's missing some foreign currencies (it has both LIRE singular and LIRA plural from Italy but not BANI from Romania right next door).  Oddly, KEN came up in an episode of Picard season one last night, when one of the Rios holograms was using what I assume was a Scottish accent.  I used to point out those kinds of words as good Scrabble words to Anne, now I call them good word search words.

Zen Word has the usual daily gifts and little competitions, and the usual track of extra bonuses that you can pay $$ to get a pass to get everything in the second column.  It has alternating features that swap out every few days: one has you finding butterflies (wit upgrades and unlocking new scenes) and the other is a little race of koi fish where you try to win five rounds before the other 5 random players.  The power ups are simple: a light bulb uncovers one letter for 80 coins, and the fireworks give you 5 letters for 240 coins.  Since each win in the Koi Races gets you 50 coins, you will soon be past the point where you would ever need to spend $$ on those.  The other bonuses are also fairly generous.

Zen Word is most similar to Word Trip.  In Word Trip, the locations are all countries, where Zen Word uses generic natural locations like "night" or "forest".  Word Collect generally asks for a lot more words per level, and it can be annoying getting stuck on the 18th word when it turns out to be some mix of letters you weren't expecting.  We enjoy playing Zen Word together, where we are flagged as being faster than 90% of players most of the time.

You can get it ad free forever for $4.99, which was worth it to not have the time-wasting ads, and never give the ads a chance to mess with settings or install things.

While these games may be wastes of time on the surface, there are words in my head like ORT (a small bit of food) that I would not have had bouncing around without these puzzle games to bring them out of hiding.

2 Nov 2024 Update: this is our go-to game after dinner or before bed.  We will put our heads together and swipe those letters frantically, and in those little fish races we're almost always number 1.  We still complete most puzzles with the "faster than 90%" message, and it's funny on Anne's account where her little fish is called Annetrouble.  She is up to about level 5400, and on my phone I'm at about level 2300 (I only get some short breaks at work and a bit before bed).  She has collected all the butterflies, so those all just turn into coins now ... so if they're really going to "Add more Scenes Soon", now would be good.

I definitely have some vocabulary in my head that wasn't there a few months ago.  Sometimes I look at those words lists on the screen and they have a nice cadence to them, and I wonder if I could pull a poem out of it.  I have not done so yet, but it would be a funny way to give the pasttime a purpose.