clockwords

Steampunk Scrabble.  That's the best description I can give you of the internet game, Clockwords.  You're an inventor who's discovered a machine that runs on the power of language.  Your evil nemesis sends mechanical spiders to take away your best secrets.  Nonsense, really, and largely irrelevant.  The game is all about generating words from a small set of letters as quickly as possible.  There's a typing aspect too, since if you can't type them quickly, you're going to lose.

Each level starts simply, with a single letter.  If you use all the letters available to you to spell a word, a new letter will enter into your "chamber."  So now there are 2 letters for you - and then 3 - and so on.  You don't have to form words using all the letters in your chamber, but it's the best strategy to pass a level.  Once you get to 6 and 7 letters, things obviously become difficult - esp. when you see those damn spiders approaching your machine and you realize that every second you spend thinking about the answer is bringing you closer to defeat.

 

So, what's a word with E, G, D, F, and Y in it?  Quick!

If that sounds fun to you, try it out.  The basic version is free, although I believe the developers have plans to charge small amounts of money if you want to buy certain letters.  I doubt it'll ever come to that for me - but then again, I'm absolutely stuck at level 11 of the prologue and wonder if I'm capable of getting past it without some help.  Surprisingly, Clockwords has a certain amount of strategic depth to it.  After each level, you can visit your "boiler" to see all the letters that you've collected.  These are the letters that will appear in your chamber during the course of a level.  As in Scrabble, letters that are harder to use in words (X, Z) do more damage against the spiders.  So you want to collect those letters but not too many of them.  You can combine letters that you've collected in the "transmute chamber" to form new letters.  For example, if you put an "I" and "S" together, you might get a "G". 

 If you try it, let me know how far you get.  Level 11 is a bitch.