Amazon is teaming with Zynga to bring a voice-enabled version of the interactive entertainment company’s popular game “Words With Friends” to Alexa.
“Words With Friends Word Pop” is available now on devices such as Echo, Echo Show and Echo Dot, and can be accessed by saying, “Alexa, open Word Pop.”
Playing the game with Alexa is pretty big deviation from the app-based, “Scrabble”-style format of the classic “Words With Friends.” Alexa offers up six letters and gives players one minute to come up with as many words as possible by either saying or spelling the words. Players earn points for both the number of words and the length of words.
It’s being rolled out as a built-in feature for Alexa devices, not requiring the installation of a third-party Alexa skill. Multiple people can join in to offer words. However, unlike the “Words With Friends” apps, there is no native multiplayer functionality to track scores for different players or enable competition across devices.
I played a few rounds this week and it took a couple tries to better understand how it works, including the fact that you have to wake Alexa each time you want to offer up a word. With the clock ticking, it can get a bit tedious.
In one game, Alexa gave me the letters M R R S E A and in another she gave me T R U E C O. Getting six or eight words out of each jumble — seam! rare! Mars! and court! true! rut! for example — was enough to score bonus points and advance to further rounds.
Alexa recommends writing the letters down at the start of each session. The video above makes it look as if playing on an Echo Show might be the best way to play.
A gathering of my family members at the kitchen counter, barking words back at Alexa, certainly didn’t help matters as the voice assistant seemed confused and denied a couple words that should have been accepted.
“I’ll stick to playing on my phone,” said my wife, a “Words With Friends” player addicted to the traditional format on her iPhone.
The move to bring the game to Amazon and Alexa comes less than a week after San Francisco-based Zynga announced a publishing partnership with Snap that will bring new games to the Snapchat social media platform.
Earlier this month, Zynga acquired Turkish gaming startup Peak Games for $1.8 billion. The deal brings with it the popular titles “Toon Blast” and “Toy Blast.”
In May, Amazon launched “Crucible,” a free-to-play online shooter that is its first original big-budget game and a major test of the tech giant’s continued dive into the crowded video game industry.
“We’re very excited to have a global leader in mobile games like Zynga create a new voice-based game based on such an entertaining franchise like ‘Words With Friends,'” Alexa director Steve Bernstein said in a news release. “Customers love playing games on Alexa and we’re excited to bring this new experience to them, testing their word knowledge in a fun and challenging way.”
