Daily iPhone App: Quizboard makes Scrabble more trivial
Since the success of Scrabblous on Facebook and Words with Friends on the iPhone, there have been plenty of Scrabble-like games out there, where you place lettered tiles on a board trying to spell words for a high score. But Quizboard smartly takes that gameplay, and puts a new twist on it: Instead of spelling words, you're laying tiles and then answering trivia questions, building a path from the edge of the board to the center and trying to score as many points as possible.
It works pretty well. There's strategy to both laying tiles out and choosing which categories to answer, and you have enough options every turn that it never feels like you're being forced into making certain choices. The questions are good for the most part, though there are a few weird ones in there -- one question looking for an answer of "The Who" offered me options of "The Oh" and "The How".
The board layout is a little strange as well. There are tiles with multiplier score bonuses on them, and they seem placed in such a way that a smart player can make sure to force an opponent into missing them, so that the game becomes more of a tic-tac-toe situation than I usually like. But that's only if you jump into a random game with someone who's really mastered the game. Just playing around with your friends will probably yield more fun than frustration.
Quizboard is a fun take on the asynchronous turn-based genre and adds some nice variety to the genre. It's available for free, with an in-app purchase to get rid of ads if you like.
