Fight with Words in Upcoming MMO Scrabble-like, Spelldom

HangZone, developers of the refreshing twist on line-drawing games, Fizzy Factory, have another puzzler in the works that will blend two of our favorite genres: word games and MMO strategy battlers. While this combination might seem odd at first description, the idea of a word board packed with bombs instead of double word score tiles has our interest p⁴i¹q¹⁰u²e¹d² (20 points).

Spelldom will task players with building up their kingdom and defenses à la a Clash of Clans-lite, populating your town grid with items that will double as guards against hordes of spell-crazy attackers. Snowy town squares will freeze players temporarily, bombs will devour the first word played on them, the fire cauldron will potentially burn up every word on the board, etc. Any object you can place between your town portal entrance and castle will help slow down the inevitable word invasion.

When not building up your own ramparts, you’ll be on the offensive, tackling other kingdoms via a single-player campaign and multiplayer challenges. You’ll have to make words on other defended grids, building out from your own letters and snaking towards the castle stronghold. Most towns will contain not only hazards to slow you down, but also a forcefield powered by a specific objective—like “Spell a 6-letter word” or “Play on each edge of the board”—that must be completed in order to claim the castle.

You’ll have a number of buffs to improve your chances of victory, including two tile swaps per match and a sprinkling of different spells, such as the “Safety Cloud Spell” which will defuse any one enemy defense. Successfully storming a player’s castle will steal scrolls from their treasury and add them to your total, increasing your rank.

In addition to the basic attack/defend gameplay, there are a lot of other little features that should keep players busy for days to come, including team tournaments, building upgrades, and a dedicated tile bag that allows you to permanently increase the point values of the letters you’ll take into battles. 20-point “E,” here we come!

Spelldom is currently in beta and will soft launch in Canada next week, on July 23rd. The iOS worldwide launch is planned “toward the end of summer.”

Jillian Werner

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Jillian will play any game with cute characters or an isometric perspective, but her favorites are Fallout 3, Secret of Mana, and Harvest Moon. Her PC suffers from permanent cat-on-keyboard syndrome, which she blames for most deaths in Don’t Starve. She occasionally stops gaming long enough to eat waffles and rewatch Battlestar Galactica.