World Series of Poker (WSOP)

Genre: On-line multi-player card

Developer: Electronic Arts (EA)

Game Description: An addictive on-line poker game using virtual chips featuring Texas Hold ‘Em and Omaha styles of Poker.

Platforms: Mac, Android

Price: Free

Download in iTunes now!

Gambling is addictive. Nuff said! But what makes this game doubly addictive is that you’re not only playing with virtual money, you’re also playing against real, live people. This renders the game unpredictable and realistic and also makes for an extremely entertaining way to spend your time. And spend your time you will! If you’re lucky to get a table full of friendly, chatty and witty players, you won’t want to leave. But sometimes you get cranky or vicious players (who mostly hide behind an avatar and have names like “K$$mya$$” or “Usuk”) who pester, harangue and rage against someone who gets under their nose, which can be extremely unpleasant and distracting. I’ve played this game for weeks now and I’m finally able to give you the low down on how to maximize your experience.

Friendly chatter

World Series of Poker is an online poker game that’s fun, easy-to-use and a great tool for learning how to play the game like a pro (more on that later). It has a clean and simple interface and a number of basic tutorials that will help get you set up quickly and effortlessly. Offering two poker styles, Texas Hold ‘Em and Omaha, WSOP also offers two tournament arenas where you can win a WSOP Bracelet and a WSOP ring – last person standing gets the trophy and the top three win modest prize money!

You’re a winner!

You have two options to sign up to the game – either as a Guest or with your Facebook account. Each player is assigned a small round token which features either an avatar or a profile pic, along with any name of your choice. If you choose to go the guest route, you have a number of free avatars to choose from, from simple card symbols to canned characters. If you log on with your Facebook account, your profile pic is automatically loaded, along with your first name, which you can replace with any name you want (but with a restricted number of characters).

This is what your basic profile looks like showing your game stats.

Once you have set up your profile, you are given $16 000 worth of free chips and 5 pieces of gold. If you want to purchase more, you can visit the store and purchase chips and gold (gold helps you to buy avatars and gifts) – just tap the “Buy Chips and Gold” button on the main page. You can choose to pay $2.99 for 750 000 chips, right up to $99.99 for 112 000 000. It’s pretty easy to buy a stack of chips and burn through them in one sitting, so be careful! But if you’re lucky (and cautious), you can play continually without spending a penny! I’ve been playing low to medium stake games for two weeks now with just the free chips I’ve earned, while trying to improve my ROI (Return on Investment). So how do you earn free chips, you ask? Well, every day each player is awarded bonus chips, which supposedly ranges from 1 000 to 1 million chips, but the most free chips I’ve ever won has been 5 000, the average being 1 500.

Free daily bonus chips

Another great way to earn free chips is to rack up a ton of friends. Whenever you play at a new table, look out for the friendly players, touch their avatar and tap the “Add Buddy” button. Similarly, when you get friend requests, you can either accept their friendship or refuse it. Make it a habit to spend a few minutes every day to send free chips to your friends – when they accept your gift, free chips are automatically sent back to you – literally a gift that keeps on giving. Again, you could get up to 1 million chips at a time, and the more friends you have, the more free chips you get. It’s a great joy to sign in to the game each day and see that you have 30+ gifts waiting for you, all offering varying amounts. It’s a sure fire way to boost your chip count. Once your friend count is in the hundreds, it can become tedious (and time consuming!) to send chips to all your friends – regular players will keep sending you chips anyway, so to save time, I send chips to those who’ve made it to the leader board, which shows the top 50 ranked players among your friends. These players tend to be regular players anyway and will ensure the river of free chips keep flowing!

A quick way to save time and earn guaranteed free chips is to send to your friends who are on your top 50 ranked leader board.

Finally, it’s time to talk about How to Become a PRO at WSOP! This is a hot topic among WSOP newbies who try and fail to gain PRO status (I originally being one of them). After I had been playing for a few weeks, I became frustrated that I couldn’t crack PRO status and started googling for tips and advice on how to become a PRO on WSOP. I found zip! nada! niks! All I could find was a few mentions here and there that you need to earn more than you lose and after 100 hands, you become a PRO. I also found a reference to this nugget: Play high stakes games and you’ll soon be a PRO. Well, I bought a few $4.99 bundles of chips, joined the high rollers and got lucky! At one point, my coffers were full at 32 million chips! Did I become PRO? No! I maintained my stack for 100 hands, 200 hands, then 1000. Still no PRO status. So I sent a friendly email to customer support (support@wsop.com) asking very nicely how gaining PRO status works. I informed them that in my opinion, you only get one shot at PRO status – your first 100 hands. And that you’ll never get PRO status after that, no matter how profitable your playing. Well, I got no reply from them at all. I understand that it must be frustrating for the game administrators to get emails of this nature (and they must get a lot! judging from the in-game comments and discussions I often come across). If it’s a hassle getting this kind of query, they shouldn’t ignore users – rather send out a standard mail response or provide in-depth details on their website for clarity. So, I decided to do some experimenting of my own. I immediately logged out of my Facebook profile, then logged on as a Guest. I set up a brand new profile with an avatar and using my free chips started to play. I played conservatively and made sure that my tally didn’t dip below the original 16 000. If I was losing at a table, I left it and tried another. I made sure to play low stake games and after 100 hands, my total number of chips sat at just over 18 000 and low and behold, I achieved PRO status. However, I really wanted to use my Facebook profile, and realised that I couldn’t have both my old FB profile and keep my new PRO status (I still maintain that if you haven’t achieved PRO status after your first 100 hands, you never will) and thus needed to create a new Facebook profile. So I logged out of my Facebook account, created a new account on Yahoo (and thus got a new email address), then used that new address to create a new Facebook profile. Using my new FB profile, I created a new profile on WSOP, then did the same thing by playing conservatively and after 100 hands, achieved my PRO status once again. This time for keeps.

I finally achieved PRO status!

The only thing I am upset about, is that I have not only lost my amazing stats (I had won loads of bracelets and rings) but also the hundreds of friends that I had made, many of whom were great fun to play with. I am slowly building my buddy list up again and have managed to come across some of my previous buddies, but it’s not the same. So, if you’re keen to play this game,(and you’re a first time player) here’s some advice. Log on to WSOP as a guest, read through the various tutorials and try your hand at some tables using the free chips that you get. Once you get a feel for the game and have more experience regarding when to fold and when to be aggressive, sign out and sign on again using Facebook (either your original profile or one set up especially for gaming) and create a new profile. Play your first 100 hands conservatively and make sure that you end up with more chips than you started with. DO NOT PLAY ANY TOURNAMENTS until you have achieved PRO status. Tournaments play havoc with your ROI because of the high buy-in fee. Only the top three win money, so if you get lousy hands and don’t get placed, your ROI drops dramatically! For general guidance on how agressively to bet, use the hand strength meter, but don’t swear by it, it can be misleading! If a hand is bad, the meter bar is red and short. For better hands the bar is longer and green. Best hands, such as straights, full houses and four-of-a-kind will show a full, green bar (see image below).

An example of how the hand meter works.

When I first started playing WSOP a few months ago, the game was quite unstable and at least two or three times a game, the app would drop. This is not only extremely frustrating, it can be expensive too. If you’re in the middle of a tournament and you get dropped out, you lose your stake (it costs 50 000+ chips to play for a bracelet and 10 000+ for a ring) which is maddening. And I’ve often seen other players mysteriously drop out half way through a hand. However, in the past few weeks, the game has stabilised radically and it doesn’t happen as often. Once, the app completely froze and I couldn’t get it to work. I solved the problem by rebooting my iPad.

All in all, World Series of Poker is loads of fun and a great way to spend your time (and money!).

**UPDATE**

I still play this game regularly and it’s a firm favourite. Here are some recent updates that have just added to it’s appeal. The free chips you get from friends yields greater returns now, I frequently get higher amounts – the most single offering so far has been 25 000. Previously, you got amounts of mostly 1 000 chips, but now it’s higher and I only occasionally get chips of 1 000.

Higher amounts of free chips are coming my way!

WSOP now has a “High roller room” for players with more than a million chips. When you log on, you see the following screen:

High rollers welcome!

You are then whisked onto the red carpet:

Onto the red carpet and into a waiting limo!

And into the high roller room where you get to play against some pretty insane people who like nothing better than to play chicken with you with some pretty audacious bluffs. Definitely not for the faint hearted!

Champagne anyone?

The Tiny Bang Story

Genre: Adventure/Puzzle

Developer: Colibri Games

Game Description: Help save the people of Tiny Planet when it is hit by an asteroid and broken into tiny pieces. Explore different regions and solve many puzzles to fix the machines that will help put the planet back together again.

Platforms: Mac, iPad, PC

Price: $2.99

Download for iPad in iTunes now!

Download for iPhone in iTunes now!

Oh my! What a wonderful little game this is. Totally absorbing, extremely entertaining and quite a brain teaser too! Boasting gorgeously rich painted scenes, quirky characters and hauntingly beautiful music, this game is an utter delight. I couldn’t stop playing it until I reached the end! Not your run-of-the-mill adventure game, The Tiny Bang Story is sweet and subtle, having very limited hints and forcing you to figure it out by yourself without the aid of a skip or solve button. This is a game to be savoured, not rushed, so if you are in a hurry to get to the end by skipping the challenges and moving on, you’ll find this game seriously frustrating.

Your mission is to visit 5 different regions of Tiny Planet, a planet which has been destroyed by an asteroid. You will need to gather puzzle pieces, tools and other items which are cleverly hidden among 50 different scenes, plus solve a series of puzzles which help you to advance and unlock further rooms as you go along. Once you have completed your mission in one region, you are whisked off in various modes of transport to a map of the destroyed planet where you need to assemble the puzzle pieces collected so far, before you can advance to the next region.

You need to be aware that The Tiny Bang Story has some really challenging puzzles that need to be solved, so make sure that you begin to play when you have a good few hours available to you to do this game justice. Although a bit frustrating at times, I loved the fact that I had to work things out for myself and had to keep working at a puzzle until it was solved, which increased the challenge. The hint button is recharged by repeatedly clicking on little buzzing, flying creatures which got a bit annoying, but once I got the hang of how the game worked, I found that I didn’t need to use the hint function all that often.

What I loved most about this game was the challenge of solving the puzzles, finding all the hidden objects, the oh-so-beautiful scenes and the exquisite music. Some of the rooms produced some wonderfully whimsical design and delightfully eccentric characters which lends this game great depth and texture. It is a sensual treat and a great game for women which earns it five fabulous stars!

Spoiler Alert!
I have to admit that when I got to the end, I didn’t realise that I had completed my mission and was furiously clicking on everything I possibly could, searching for a clue on how to finish the game. I’m so used to games which end with “Congratulations! Mission Accomplished” or some such phrases, that I missed the subtlety of the ending. (When you see the screen pictured below of all the characters in one room, it’s the end of the game!). The final two scenes allow you to replay the game’s wonderful soundtracks and to repeat any of the puzzles to your heart’s content.

Bookworm Deluxe

Genre: Puzzle

Developer: PopCap Games

Game Description: Create words by linking letters to feed our hungry green friend, Lex the Bookworm. Bigger words mean bigger bonuses but get rid of burning tiles before they get you.

Platforms: Mac, iPhone/iPod, PC, Basic Mobile, Nintendo DS, Nintendo DSi

Price: $1.99

Download for iPad in iTunes now!

Download for iPhone in iTunes now!

If you like playing word games like Scrabble or Boggle, then you’ll love Bookworm Deluxe! It’s a highly addictive game that’ll keep you coming back for more. The basic premise of the game is to create words from letters that drop down onto your screen. Link letters by clicking on them and hitting submit or double clicking the final letter in the word chain when done. To link letters, they have to be next to one another to qualify, so you need a really good eye to scrounge for words out of the jumble on your screen. Words need to be a minimum of three letters and, like Scrabble, the longer the words, the higher the score. Each time you make a word, they peel off the screen and fly into the mouth of Lex the Bookworm, allowing fresh letters to drop down to replace them. When you create longer words, different coloured bonus tiles appear, which, when used in a word, increase your score dramatically. You can also score extra points with bonus words that appear beneath Lex in the sidebar. No worries about whether or not you have created a “real” word, just check out the side bar – if your word has a score beneath it, it’s real. If not, deselect by clicking a tile not connected to your word, and try again.

If you keep making only three-letter words, red-hot burning tiles start to appear thick and fast on your screen. To slow down the rate of the burning tiles, create words that are four or more letters in length. Once the red tiles appear, try to get rid of them as fast as possible by using them in words. The longer you leave burning tiles, the quicker they start to descend by burning up the tile beneath them (each time you submit a new word, the red tiles immediately destroy the letter beneath them). Once a burning tile hits the bottom of the screen, it’s game over. So keep on top of them at all costs! Naturally, as each level progresses, the red tiles fall faster and faster, so you will literally be handling hot potatoes to keep progressing.

Bookworm Deluxe comes with two modes – Classic Game, which is basically relaxed play but is by no means easy, and Action Mode, which is a faster, more challenging version of the game where burning tiles come fast and furious. The game comes with a funky tune and has a highly amusing ranking system for each level that you complete. As soon as you reach the ranking score for each level, a progress screen appears providing details of your best and longest words for that round, allowing you to move up to the next level.

The mobile platforms have a welcome addition – a library of “books” of different themes, each having a list of bonus words that you need to “tick off” which earns you extra points.

All in all, Bookworm Deluxe is a great game for women and a wonderful way to while away the day. It’s also perfect for playing when you have spare time between tasks, as you can pause and leave the game at any phase. The mobile version is a must have for when standing in a queue or sitting in a waiting room. Extremely addictive, this game has kept me up until the early hours of the morning on many occasions, gaining a five star rating from me!