The online version of Bookworm swept through the halls of High Moon Studios in 2004. A few developers had a window open playing a quick game during builds and I just had to try being a word game afficionado.
Since it was standard practice to leave computers on after leaving work, I also left the game window open, resuming it the following day. Over the course of several days, I continued playing the game and purposefully lost after earning 5,245,340 points.
The gameplay suffers from a mild exploit whereby the player can score 'safe' words by ensuring that there are no singleton tiles in any column of letters. That way, no Fire tiles would be created. For example, finding a 3-letter word late in the game usually will spawn a Fire tile at the top of the board. However, if all 3 letters are in the same column of letters, a Fire tile will not spawn. Likewise, a 4-letter word with 2 letters in one column and 2 in another will not spawn a Fire tile.
I'll play again and report back my success!
Here's the latest report: seems like the online version of the game got mauled by ads: every few rounds or so the game is interrupted with ads and in a level 40 game with over 1,000,000 points, after a Nintendo DS ad for a point-and-click I Spy game, Bookworm never came back. Beware wordsmiths!
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