New from Spry Fox Games: ALPHABEAR

I got sick.  I thought I was just too sick to ride an exercise bike or be at work, but upon arriving home I realized I'm also too sick to even play Shadowrun.  All that reading would require me to sit upright, instead of maintaining the horizontality my body is so desperately craving right now.

Luckily, there are games on my phone!  Spry Fox sent me an e-mail just today to let me know about their new game Alphabear.  It is a word game, which automatically puts it in the "my jam" column, and a "make words out of a small set of letters" game, which gives me a kind of home court advantage.

Alphabear presents you with a field of squares; some are letters, some are bears, some are hidden.  You can make a word out of any letters you can see.  As soon as you make a word, the letters that comprised it will turn into bears, which are adorable in all the sizes and shapes the game presents.

Alphabear is never unpleasant to look at.

As is often the case with Spry Fox games, there are some neat computer things happening to make the largest possible bears.  This is something that the giant nerd in me appreciates, quietly, in the background.

The giant nerd in me also likes being rewarded for making giant words.  Plus, the giant-word-making also makes giant bears, which yields its own rewards.  The bar on any given board is set pretty low in comparison to the scores I've been able to achieve so far, but Alphabear does a good job of making that feel like nice things are happening to you all the time.

They wanted 4500 points to unlock The Golden Egg there.
I scored almost that much with just bears.

Alphabear is clever and amusing, without making unreasonable demands of the player.  This is more or less exactly what I want from a phone game.  It is free to download and play, which is nice; it employs free-to-play monetization strategies, which is less nice.  But, since we're not yet flourishing in a post-work society, this unpalatable necessity can be overlooked.  (You can also pay $4.99 once to rid the game of the "wait to play" drawback entirely.  I opted to do this almost immediately.)

It more than makes up for the freemium bullshit by limiting its "social media appeal" to a cute "bearphrase" at the end of each game.  Whenever your end-of-game reward reveals a bear (which has been every game so far), that bear will take a photo of itself and supply a Mad Libs sentence, with the blanks filled in by words you made that round.

The game does not know whether or not the result makes sense.
This is a good thing.

Alphabear is available (for free!) on Google Play (Android) and the iTunes Appstore (iOS).  Don't not check it out!