Wordscapes and Word Stacks Apps: Pretty Fun

For years I've enjoyed doing the Jumble word-scramble puzzle in the daily newspaper.  Each puzzle features four five-letter scrambled words and two with six letters (the Sunday edition features all six words with six letters).  Unscramble each word and take the circled letters to form a scrambled daily phrase, for which the inset picture provides a clever clue.  My local newspaper has become so worthless that the only thing left in it with any use for me is its Jumble puzzle...so instead of blowing my money on that I have switched to a phone app called Wordscapes, another work-scramble puzzle.  It was Melissa who introduced me to it...she had it on her phone and sometimes would ask me to help her when she got stumped.  Well, every weekend from Friday evening through Sunday evening Wordscapes holds its own tournament, something that I got hooked on a couple of months ago.  For the last few weeks I had consistently finished in the top three, actually winning the thing once.  But this past Friday evening, for some reason everybody else decided to become a Wordscapes tourney champion and the scores went through the roof.  Let's see, with only about six hours to go I'm in 38th place...think I'll pass up on the rest of this week's tournament...

This fun type of activity reminded me of the fledgling years on the Internet when we had an AOL account and would play in their various trivia games...those were the days, you know, when getting online meant undergoing eardrum-piercing, torturous sounds from the modem.  Wordscapes has an associated game app called Word Stacks, which is a much more complicated version of the word search puzzle...the letters shift positions as you find the words, pretty challenging at times!  I haven't seen any tournaments for Word Stacks yet, but maybe it's just a matter of time...