Zynga's 'Words With Friends' Game Celebrates 5th Anniversary with an Updated Design Relaunch

By Mark Rollins
Words with Friends

Zynga, creator of the immensely popular online "Words with Friends" has announced an update of its word game to be "sleeker, smarter, and more social". This update coincides with the fifth anniversary of the popular game that has been named by Apple as the App Store's #1 Free Game of all time, with more than 55 million matches being played at any given moment. According to an official video from Zynga, "Words with Friends" will receive the many updates.

One update is the ability to accept a "Community Match Game". This allows the user a feature similar to Tinder where the user can look at potential players and swipe them to the left to play them, or swipe right to reject them. The user can see a player's picture and how difficult an opponent he or she will be. There is even a feature known as "Smart Match", which will suggest a player within the Words with Friends Community that will be a good match for the user.

The area around the board will be simpler to navigate, as Zynga's designers claim that this game has a "more modern design befitting a mobile app" but has "several new things that players will immediately recognize as new".

One of these new things is a dictionary, which has access to over 170,000 words. This will allow the user to look up a potential word for playing, and even see how frequently this word is used by other players. It will also show how strong or weak this word is compared to other words that can be played on your current game board.

Words with Friends can also be played in solo mode, which can even be practiced offline. This feature has been requested by many "Words with Friends" players for quite a while.

Users also can check out their profile and stats with all kinds of metrics and graphs including highest scores, games completed and average word score. This data can be shared with other players.

Zynga first debuted the game in 2009, and it quickly became a huge hit, due to its similarity to the popular board game Scrabble. Comedienne Sarah Silverman recently referenced "Words with Friends" with her recent hosting of NBC's Saturday Night Live. She suggested that there should be an app that tells her when her friends are "taking a dookie", and then she realized that there is already an app for that, and it's called "Words with Friends".