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Merriam-Webster word games offer a quick hit of fun
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This doesn't show the half of the games available on Merriam-Webster Online.
One of the best reference book sites, Merriam-Webster, goes beyond the obvious searchable dictionary and thesaurus by offering another product to appeal to word lovers: in-browser vocabulary games. The best part is that most of the games are not only edifying, but fun.
The banner game is Scrabble Sprint, a race to make the highest-scoring words you can out of a hand of seven letter tiles. Bonus tiles like double word score add an element of authentic Scrabble strategy. The replayability is high, because you get a different hand every time. I could see this being a real time sink.
On the New Games page, you will find flashy versions of classic word games, as well as intriguing new efforts. In Word Sudoku (produced by DKM Software), you must insert words into a 9x9 sudoku grid, across or down, so that letters do not repeat in rows, columns or 3x3 cells. This is more challenging than it seems at first, and there's supposed to be a new puzzle every hour. Dangerous!
My favorite games to play, though, are the quirky ones that appear as Today's Game. That's where you'll find Add Diction, in which you build a word chain by adding letters from a pool to progress from "as" to "degrades," for example. These games you can really only play once, but like a wafer-thin after-dinner mint, sometimes that is satisfying.
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