User:Czar/drafts/Letterpress (video game)

Gameplay

Screenshots of typical gameplay and post-game review

Letterpress is a puzzle game in which two human players take turns finding words in an onscreen grid of letters.

Development

Loren Brichter, the developer

Former Apple employee, Tweetie Twitter client creator, and "pull-to-refresh" multitouch gesture inventor Loren Brichter designed Letterpress. After leaving Twitter, Brichter spent some time testing new ideas. Brichter and his wife were waiting for a dinner table one evening, both playing the word game SpellTower on their phones alone, when Brichter considered the idea of making a multiplayer version. Brichter also acknowledged some influence from Boggle and color war concepts. In an early version of the game, Brichter awarded additional points based on letter proximity but found that games would extend indefinitely when players could not capture the last few tiles. Brichter solved this issue by moving to a defense-style game mechanic in which players could protect tiles from being captured. Apple's GameCenter handled the multiplayer matchmaking so that Brichter did not need to code it himself.

Brichter later worked on the Paper app's animations and as a Facebook consultant.

Reception and legacy

The game received "generally favorable" reviews, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. It won a 2013 Apple Design Award and was Apple's 2012 runner-up for iPhone game of the year.

The Verge's Ellis Hamburger wrote that Letterpress combined the best of Scrabble and Othello.

In 2013, Simple CEO Josh Reich chose Letterpress as his most underrated but best executed smartphone app.

Letterpress influenced subsequent indie mobile games, such as Threes (2014, pictured)

Reviewers noted that Letterpress later influenced the 2014 mobile puzzle game Threes. Letterpress's visual style informed Apple's 2013 iOS 7 redesign, which moved the platform to a "flatter, minimalist" design language.