Bookworm Adventures - Today's Time Waster

I'm a sucker for spelling games, and Bookworm Adventures is by far the best I've played in a long time. If you read Penny Arcade, you've heard of this one already. It's a turn-based RPG for Windows that works like most RPGs' battle modes: You face off against a series of enemies, increasing your power and gaining new items and abilities as you win battles. The twist, of course, is that you do battle with words. At the bottom of the battle screen you have a set of letter tiles. Some letters are more powerful (think Scrabble) that you click on to spell a word, and then you click Attack. The better, and harder, a word is, the more damage it does. As you progress, you collect items which you can equip three at a time. The "Bow of Zyx," for example, boosts your damage whenever you spell words with the letters X, Y, or Z. Other items are more generic RPG items, like shields that block some damage or certain types of attacks, and you can also pick up potions that restore your health, boost your next attack, or remove effects like poison. Each level has a half-dozen enemies followed by a boss enemy, and the game gets pretty challenging surprisingly fast. You can download a trial version of Bookworm Adventures for free, which is several hours' worth of good entertainment, or you can drop $29.95 to get the full version, which includes three adventures.

Tags: bookworm adventures, BookwormAdventures, fun, game, shareware, spelling, timewasters, windows, words