How many times have you been sitting around with your iPhone-owning friends in a big park, and thought to yourselves, “Wouldn’t it be totally rad if we could walk around the park, collecting letters so that we could compete to see who can make some high-scorin’ words?” Well, next time you’re in that situation, you can whip out your iPhones and go to town on Seek ‘n Spell.
The Game Plan
The idea behind Seek ‘n Spell is to physically find letters on the map so that you can build words and score points. You start with your initials, and can add up to seven more letters. With your ten letters, you try to build words; getting the highest score within the set time limit. Think of it as Tag, with Scrabble slapped on.
You can set a time limit from one to thirty minutes. After you have gathered all the other players, who must all have 3G iPhones, the host starts the game, and everyone gets going. A map is displayed on your screen, and you have to physically go to the letters displayed on the map. It displays the real landscapes on screen, with satellite imagery.
You can only have ten letters, so you have to think about which ones you’re going to go first. The game is part race, and part strategy. You might get to a letter first, but if you can’t make it work to get a high-scoring word, it’s not very valuable. One trick you can pull on the game is that you can put in any initials you want. Since these initials are part of your bank that you can’t change, you can lie to the game, and use your loose morals to your advantage.
It’s a Pain to Get Going
The difficult part about playing Seek ‘n Spell is the set-up requirements. First, you have to have friends who have 3G iPhones, since you need GPS to play. When the developers contacted us the email kept bouncing around from person to person because none of the others had friends who were as cool as mine. And lastly, every one of the participants has to shell out $2.99 for their copy. While you can technically play by yourself, there is no value in playing by yourself.
The second, and for me, the most difficult part is having plenty of space to play. You cannot play this game in an urban environment. When I fired it up downtown, it just laid letters out in random places. A lot of the letters were inside buildings I couldn’t enter. And there isn’t any way for say the admin to move the pieces to move convenient locations. One thing the game will do for you is use Google Maps to look for nearby parks. It’s not exactly perfect though (talking about in Japan, not sure about USA).
Think Before You Pull The Trigger
If you have friends meet the coolness quotient, and are willing to play with you, and have a park or a large meadow to play in, Seek ‘n Spell could be really fun. The rub is, it’s gonna be really hard to play otherwise.
Why are we featuring such a niche game? Because it brings in something new to the App Store. The iPhone is what the developers make of it, and this is a stunning example of the power of GPS, 3G, and maps technology put to good use. Give it a little thought, and if you think you have the set-up to pull it off, I say go for it.
