The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Words with Friends was all like “We have a new game called Hanging with Friends!” And I’m like, “Words with Friends people, I dislike that Zynga bought you, but you’re still like, one of if not the best multiplayer game on iOS. I will try your game.”

So I did.
It’s kind of a buggy mess.

The game itself is solid design. It uses the same asynchronous multiplayer sort of style that makes Words with Friends so fun. Basically, you’re playing Hangman that way. Only, if course, people aren’t being hanged. They’re holding balloons that pop. But still. Basically, you draw a bunch of Words with Friends tiles, and build a word. Your score for the word goes into a meter that fills up. When you fill it up, you earn 20 coins! In any case, you then send your word off. Your friend gets the word, and tries to guess it, Hangman style, with number of guesses based on the size of the word, (More letters equals less guesses) with the last vowel in the word always automatically revealed. If they fail, they lose a balloon. If they win, they don’t. Either way, they send you a word. It keeps going back and forth until someone loses all 5 balloons.

For each round, you get 3 hints you can use. “Suspects” highlights four letters, one of which must be in the word. This is by far the most useful. “Extinguisher” labels 4 letters that aren’t in the word for you. This rarely hits the letters you are thinking of picking, and tends to not be useful. “Revive” essentially gives you one extra guess, as it “undoes” one wrong guess. You get one free use of these a round, but can “buy” additional uses for 20 coins.

Buying those uses is the one thing that seems a bit silly, though. It just seems like it would be worth your time to play a lot of games with randoms that you aren’t trying to win to build up coins to win the games you care about. Of course, this will be mitigated once they get the coin store in the game, where I assume you’ll be able to trade all these coins I’ve been stockpiling for little avatar things and whatnot. That’s what I hope anyway. I don’t get the coin thing.

The real problem with the game, though, is how glitchy it is. There are serious bugs in the game as it is. You press buttons, and nothing happens. You ask the game to show you what another player does, and stuff just doesn’t show up on the screen. It’s even stuff like your little avatars showing the “happy” expression when something bad happens. It’s really silly. I mean, clearly, they’ll patch it at some point, but it’s on the verge of unplayable at the moment, which is a shame.

Eventually, this game will be great. Hangman is a much more even playing field game. It’s fun regardless of skill level, whereas I can see some people being turned off to being utterly crushed in Scrabble, as I am over and over with some people I play Words with Friends with. Still, it’s got a free version. It may be worth your time to try. But maybe wait until they patch it once.