The Friday Game: Panda Poet

If it seems like only a few weeks ago that I was talking about a game designed by Spry Fox, and that’s because it was only a few weeks ago. According to Daniel Cook, the company’s chief creative officer, they’ve had three releases this month. It’s been “a wee bit hectic”.

Panda Poet is too good to miss out on, though. As with the wonderful Facebook match-three reinvention Triple Town, Panda Poet is another game that began life on the Kindle. Now’s it’s been upgraded to a full web-based multiplayer experience, and it’s quickly become a bit of an obsession.

Also like Triple Town, Panda Poet is a game about territory. This time, you capture it by spelling words on a 7x7 grid – although you can buy a premium account to unlock larger boards – and growing, if that’s the right term, a series of pandas. Each letter you use creates a panda tile, and the pandas get larger every time you build either a square or a rectangle out of these tiles. Cook refers to the end result as Scrabble meets Go, and that’s an annoyingly optimal definition.

As is the case with Scrabble, you play the board rather than the word if you want to win, and there are some wonderful trails of thought to be lost in as you decide whether to expand on a panda now, or let your opponent do the work so that you can move in next time, hopefully locking it down for good. Panda ownership lies with the last person to add to the captured territory, and while you can get a pretty good score by simply bashing out complex words that use a few nice bonus letters, you’re going to have to master the points-maximising land grab in order to have any chance of beating a decent player.

Over on his excellent website, Cook’s written a thoughtful post about Panda Poet’s gentle layer of social interactivity. As with Words With Friends, you can also chat to your rival as you play against them. It’s been a rare game for me, even playing with strangers, that hasn’t turned into a pleasant meandering conversation as we move from one word to the next.

With a system that reveals a handful of new letters each turn ensuring that you never have too many options to confuse yourself with, and a central mechanic that sees big score boosters going back and forth between players every few minutes, there are so many good things about Panda Poet that you should really check it out for yourself.

I’m RedPanda199 if you fancy a game.