Crispy Gamer has been playing Word Ace, and they want to play with you! Stop by the article, grab their friend code, and then TAKE ALL THEIR MONIES!!!

AppSlappy’s Podcast talks about Word Ace! it’s a great podcast, but if you just want to jump to the Word Ace action, hit up 28:00, and you’re off to the races! While you’re there, check out their comic EXTRALIFE.

Awesome!

The fine folks over at oneriot.com took a look at Word Ace, and had this to say:

“Killing a few hours on a long commute is an easy thing to do in the era of the iPhone, but the intellectual stimulation and thrill of solitaire, snood, and brick breaker can often be easily matched by a bout of intense fingernail chewing. Well take heed, gloomy touchpad touchers - a more discerning set of smartphone users has discovered Word Ace.”

Fantastic! Check out the writeup, and while you’re there, search for something awesome… like Word Ace!

With 80,000 registered users… it’s time to raise the stakes!

NEW FEATURE UNLOCKED: $4,000 buy-in, $100/200 blind tables are now open!

Using “Play Now!” the game will put you in a game with an appropriate buy-in/blind size. If you want to manually select your buy-in/blind size, just use the “Select Table” option and pick your poison.

Good luck!

We’re happy to say that Word Ace Pro for the iPhone just went live!

“What’s Word Ace Pro?” you might ask. You’ve been playing Word Ace, after all - what’s left out of Word Ace that shows up in Word Ace Pro? What do you get for that $1?

Here’s what you get:

• A shiny app icon (pictured above)
• A little gold “Pro” by the Word Ace icon
• 12,000 chips
• In-app purchases are enabled

That’s it. Word Ace has *everything else* that Word Ace Pro has.

So, why Pro? The basic issue is that Apple only lets in-app purchases work for paid applications. So if you have a free app, you can’t have in-app purchase! So we need to charge something for Pro to enable in-app purchases.

For Word Ace, we’re releasing the entire game, free of charge, to everyone who wants to give it a shot. You can play as much as you want for a whopping $0. If you want your friends to try it, so you can play together, they can do so with absolutely no cost, and no risk. Play as much as you want.

If you want more chips, if you love the game, if you want to help us continue to make games like this, if you like the idea that you can set the price of a game… grab Word Ace Pro.

Coming soon, in addition to chip packages, we’ll have a link where you can just donate a couple bucks, and in exchange, we’ll give you an icon by your profile for 30 days that’ll show other players that you are helping support the game.

For our Pre users… there is no Word Ace Pro! Why? Because we can do everything we need to in the standard version of Word Ace. In a few days, you’ll have all the options (save the shiny gold icon) available to you in Word Ace! Just keep your eye on the “Chips & More” section!

Thanks!

So, a lot of people have expressed interest in physical cards for Word Ace, so they can play with their friends in real life! As you maybe have seen in an earlier post, we are, in fact, working on getting real decks of cards printed up. So keep an eye out here, and they’ll be available soon.

Now, that said, nothing should stop you from building your own decks to play. You have the official letter distribution & values, so with a stack of index cards, a pen, and something you can use for poker chips, you’ve got everything you need!

But just so that you don’t have to do some of the experimenting we did, here’s a quick tip for how to play Word Ace in real life, that might not be completely obvious:

While there’s nothing unusual about the first few stages of each hand, wrapping up the hand can be a little tricky. You want to make sure that everyone “reveals” their word simultaneously. If you go in turns, if the best word is formed from the community cards, people might switch their “real” answer at the last minute.

To make sure the reveal is fair, grab yourself a 30-second timer, and a pen & paper for each player. During the “Word Ace!” phase, start the timer, and have people write down their best word. When the timer’s up, everyone drops their pens, and the words are revealed one by one!

This makes sure everyone’s on the same level playing field. It also keeps a record of the words everyone spelled, which can often remind you of times when you ended up with close calls, or hilarious results.

Anyway… have fun playing Word Ace, whether you’re playing it on the iPhone, an iPod Touch, the Pre, or with a bunch of friends in the real world!!

Have any stories about bizarre, hilarious, or particularly close hands? Send us your stories, and if we get a kick out of ‘em, we’ll post them on the blog!

Word Ace gets a mention on TouchGen’s podcast! Check it out here!

About the 40 minute mark! And please, don’t get it confused with “Word Face”!

There’s a great mention of Word Ace here! We also got a handful of writeups on Touch Arcade, Pocket Gamer, and FingerGaming! Go show ‘em some love!

And if you’re not following @WordAce on Twitter, perhaps you should consider it!

We just officially crossed 70,000 registered players about three hours ago!

A question that’s come up a number of times is, “What dictionary does Word Ace use?” The answer is that Word Ace uses “TWL” - the “Tournament Word List,” which is essentially the American Scrabble Dictionary. So if you’re familiar with the rules of word creation in Scrabble, you should be able to know what is and isn’t acceptable in Word Ace no problem.

The basic rules are, no foreign-language words, and no proper nouns.

This can get a little confusing, because some things that you’ll first associate with a proper noun, like Harry, the name, are also non-proper-noun words, like harry, or, “to harrass and annoy.”

The one big word that seems to be tripping people up is “Zen” - it’s a great word, uses the Z with some other common letters, but unfortunately, in terms of the TWL, it’s still considered a proper noun, and isn’t a valid word.

I hope this helps people understand what the basic rules are, and we’ll be incorporating this information into our game’s help system in the next update.

Thanks!

From Left: Dan, Schwern, Colin, Seppo, Crystal, all looking dignified.

We just want to say “thanks” to the Word Ace community! You’ve helped us reach over 60,000 downloads on the Palm Pre in two short weeks, and brought us to the #3 spot in the Free Word Game section of the iTunes Store, only two days after launching on the iPhone & iPod Touch!

Over 300,000 games of Word Ace have been played so far, and the feedback we’ve gotten from the community has been fantastic!

Thank you!!

- the team at Self Aware Games