Imangi is a fun and unique word puzzle game from Imangi Studios, LLC. The game board consists of a 48 lettered tiles randomly placed in a grid. Players of Imangi are challenged to build as many words as they can by sliding the rows and columns around effectively rearranging the letters on the board. In order to score points a word must be activated which is done by tapping each letter that makes up the word. If the word is valid it will turn green if not it will turn blue. When building words in Imangi one must ensure that all connected and activated tiles form words. For example if you activate the word D-O-G on row one and then try to activate C-A-T directly below on row two, neither word will be valid. This is because you’ve activated the words D-O-G and C-A-T horizontaly but also the non-words D-C, O-A and G,T vertically. In Imangi words must be valid left to right and top to bottom. Imangi is currently priced at $3.99 in the iTunes App Store.

I like Imangi a lot and have been playing it quite a bit lately. It’s sort of like a weird cross between scrabble and Rubik’s Cube. Certain letters have a red icon behind them which means they are worth more points when used in a word. This reminds me of scrabble’s double and triple word scores. As you start building more words you will inevitably need to mess up one of your current words for a few turns in order to build the new word. Planning in advance the moves it will take to put your existing words back together is the real challenge of Imangi. This process feels a lot like playing with a Rubik’s cube and is frustratingly fun. Once you figure out some basic tile switching tricks the game really opens up and becomes a lot more fun.

Controlling Imangi is very simple. Slide the lettered rows and columns left,right,up or down and then tap letters to build words. It works well. The only thing I would like to see added is a way to move two rows at once and maybe an undo feature.

When I initially started playing Imangi I felt like something was missing. I kept waiting for my built words to disappear and release new tiles. This is one of the problems with Imangi. There is no end to a puzzle and nothing, other then your smarts, to keep you playing. There is no time limit, no temporary power ups and no way to re-randomize tiles not belonging to a word. In Imangi there’s also no real progress. At anytime you can untap your words and rearrange them, effectively starting over. Maybe adding features like this would take away from the game, maybe these things aren’t what the developers were going for. I can understand that, but for me, I wanted something a little more. I wanted to be timed or to be limited to a specific number of moves.

Imangi is an open endeded word puzzle game for the iPhone. It’s effective mix of scrabble and Rubik’s Cube style game play yields a fun and challenging experience. With a one dollar price drop and perhaps a few goals or other objective based features Imangi would be a must have. As it stands I would only recommend Imangi to those interested in word puzzles enough to stick with a puzzle that essentially has no end.

By: Aaron Robbins