Tiler More

This quickly became my favorite game to play. It’s relaxing; no outside pressure with scores, timing, or leaderboards; doesn’t ask for my money, data, or a review; and the right kind of challenging where you couldn’t classify this as an idle game but it also doesn’t increasingly get more difficult, it’s merely always a nice challenge/puzzle; and it always saves your spot if you’re mid-game. My only quip that makes it hard to play are the bugs. One freezes the cube you’re working on, after clumping two letters together, so you’re left with eight spaces to play rather than the nine original. Another bug (that seems connected to the first) is a letter itself freezing on the cube spot so it won’t move, sometimes it just disappears too. Closing the app doesn’t help the issue at hand either because of the incredible game-saving aspect; I guess one has to either try to play it through the round with considerable disadvantages with the bugs, or start over which can be very disappointing/anti-climatic. Besides the bugs, which don’t happened too often, this game is wonderful.

After playing one round of easy mode I jumped straight to brutal to test my theory, and I was correct. This is a puzzle gane that is virtually impossible to lose or get stuck on. If you ever run out of space on the board, just combine some letters together because you can just unstack them later on. There is so much potential space available on the board that you might as well just keep pulling letters until it's almost full then see which words you can complete. On my third run through I decided to just combine like letters together and put the vowels all to one side so they would be easier to search when building words. What I mean to say is that space management isn't a challenge in this game because there is always waaaay more space available than you need. Can't quite think of an easy fix for it, though. I do think that the interface is brilliantly elegant and creative and I love the concept. If the challenge level is ever successfully raised to any level of difficulty, however, I would definitely suggest an undo button because unintentional moves are pretty frequent on the mobile. Great job creators!

Tiler More has a unique tile/letter-stacking mechanic that feels unlike any other word game I've played: it creates a very engaging challenge in managing your board space and letter groups, but it's not stressful thanks to the fact that you can un-merge tiles anytime (as long as you have room to put them somewhere!). Managing to maneuver letters into a full word, then tapping completed words to send them into the tile abyss -- along with the accompanying sound effects -- are all super satisfying. The three difficulty modes offer a nice ramp-up as you learn to play, as well as options for varying game lengths: from a super quick session (Easy) up to a brain-furrowing think-about (Brutal). Even though I love that there's no timer in the core game, which keeps it extremely calm and stress-free, I would like to see other game modes in the future that use something like a time-based score to throw another obstacle at you. But even without that, this is a fantastic, soothing experience that more often than not turns into "just one more game."