Monaco is the playground of the rich and famous, and home to perhaps the most famous Grand Prix in the world. Now it’s a card game on your Treo as well.

The game starts with a pleasant menu screen (left) and a quick blast of Mediterranean music.

If you jump straight into a game, you’ll find yourself confronted with a screen (right) showing a similar layout to the conventional solitaire card game with one important difference. Instead of the face up cards showing a suit and number, the cards have letters on them.

The aim of the game is to stack the letters on top of each other so that they form words. The difficulty is that you can only stack letters if they form part of a word, so it can take a lot of juggling letters to release one necessary to complete an important word.

You can alter the difficulty of Word Monaco by choosing from three different decks of cards. The easy deck includes wild cards that can be any letter, the medium deck contains most of the alphabet but not Q, Z, X, J or V, and the hard deck contains all letters.

You can also change the rules of the game. In the easy game, you simply have to use all of the letters to make words. In the medium game, all words must contain at least three letters. In the hard game, all words must contain at least four letters. The medium and hard games also have special gold letters that must either be all in one word or only one gold letter per word.

When you change the rules of the game, you automatically change backgrounds to different Mediterranean inspired themes. The link between the game and the Mediterranean is somewhat tenuous. But the graphics are certainly nice.

A problem with many word games like this one is that quality is determined by dictionary size, and frequently small dictionaries are employed. But in this case, the dictionary is really quite good. In the 20 or so games that I played, almost all of the words I tried were allowed. (Word Monaco was developed by a company in Seattle. So it’s more accommodating to USA English than the Queen’s English I abuse.) The downside to the game’s encompassing dictionary is its memory footprint. Thankfully the game runs happily from the SD card because it’s a whopping 1.9 megabytes.

Word Monaco is a stylus driven affair; there is no 5 way nav support. This will be a negative for some. But personally, it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game.

Word Monaco is professionally put together, includes instructions and tips for beginners, and has a statistics screen so you can check your performance from time to time.

Word Monaco solitaire is a novel twist on a familiar card game, which results in a truly novel game. It can range from simple to impossibly difficult depending on user defined settings. At $14.95, Word Monaco doesn’t break the bank (or should that be Casino?).

If you enjoy word games, give the demo a try. It’s fully featured and you can play up to 15 games before registering.

Related Links

Download Word Monaco now.

Browse Treo Games in mytreo.net/store.

Filed under: Software reviews