Playing Games

I’ve never been one to use my phone to play games. We have an XBox One S, a Wii U, and a Wii, but I never play games there, either.  What I do enjoy, though, are word games.  Now normally, I would have a handful of puzzle books laying around, and from time to time, particularly in the winter months, I find myself sitting on occasion with one of those.  However, recently, my sister-in-law invited me to play Scrabble Go with her in a text message. 

Now as I said, I do love word games, so I reluctantly installed it on my phone.  Wow!  I’m hooked.  Now I have multiple games going with various friends at any given time, and I have been sucked in by the special limited time games variations they have, too, like Word Search, Word Path, and Scrabble Adventure.  And it seems after practically every play, you are forced to sit through an advertisement for yet another game!  I have to admit that they’ve gotten me a couple of times.  The other day, I ended up installing Daily Themed Crossword and then spent all day on my day off playing the puzzle of the day as well as some of the archived puzzles.  And that was after I’d played all my various games on Scrabble Go for the day! 

And after seeing an ad last night, I ended up installing Cross Logic, too!  I do love logic puzzles.  It’s one of the pencil puzzles I do in puzzle magazines.  I found these almost too easy, though.  I eventually moved on to the hardest category they offered just to get a challenge. 

Then after I bought a new laptop, I discovered I could install a program called BlueStacks that emulates an Android environment so that you can install games from Google Play on your computer.  It locks up sometimes so that I have to close it and restart it, but I was able to get the above games on my computer that way, too.  With my old eyes, sometimes it’s easier to play them on my big screen rather than on my phone.

But man, have I been sucked in!  Now I find myself watching less tv in my leisure time, which is often when I’m doing other chores, and instead, I’m idly wasting away in a chair somewhere playing word games on my phone or computer!  Ugh!  I’m afraid I’m turning into my kids!  The hours just whittle by.  It makes me feel bad, but boy, do I love word games!

It’s brain stimulation, right?!?

My all-time favorite pencil puzzle is Crypto-Families.  Now if I could get Crypto-Families Round for Android, I’d be all over it.  But it appears it’s only available for Apple.  Ugh!