Quarrel

Troy came up with "BEAST", which is pretty good, actually, as that B is a surprise high scorer. Unfortunately for him - and I promise this is true, even though I'll admit it was mainly an accident of my fat fingers - I got "ABSINTH". A classic drink, and a seven-letter neutron bomb. It was all over for Troy. If he could have ragequit, I bet he would have.

After that amazing match, almost all my quick matches have been equally good: dynamic, feisty, and surprising. Quarrel works, then, even in compromised single-player form, because the AIs work. They make things almost as dramatic as it is playing against real friends. They have personality, quirks, and they're fun to clash with even if, at times, you feel that you're reading more into their behaviour than might actually exist.

They're heroes in their own way, because they take a game that should be a disaster and render it deeply satisfying. Ever played Scrabble against an AI? It's horrible. When you win, you know it's holding back. When you lose, you know it's a computer and so it was never a fair match in the first place.

None of that here. When you win, you can believe it's because Dwayne's a big old dummy and you're simply better than him. When you lose, you can console yourself with the fact that bookworm Rex spends too much time in his library. Kali really would know a word like "Vanadium". She's a devilish swot.

It's not always brilliant, of course. In big matches, you still can spend a lot of time waiting while AI plays AI, even if you do get a nice anagram to do for points while they're at it, and the game has no real answer for the fact that, if it's four troops against two, the player with four has to screw up very badly indeed to lose. (Or perhaps the player with two used "QI".)

Elsewhere, there are little presentational issues: I'd like to have a quicker way to get the letters off the playing area again if I've messed up, for example, while if you're Quarreling on an iPhone, the handy text along the bottom of the screen that tells you what the words you're using actually mean can be quite hard to make out.

But mostly, Quarrel's a wonderful package: a decent, if rather grumpy, campaign, lovely quick match options, and, even better, a daily match, which sees players all over the world tackling the same map with the same enemies. It's the meat of the game once you've worked through the main levels, and it'll do as asynchronous Quarrel until the real asynchronous Quarrel comes out - hopefully in a patch.

It shouldn't work, but it does - just as some might say that word games themselves shouldn't be having this period of late summer hipsterism when the industry's meant to be all about space battles and survival horror.

Quarrel is a victory for good ideas and also for clever implementation. I suspect that the game's still waiting for multiplayer in order to really show us what it can do but, until that arrives, this is a smart addition to iOS in its own right.