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“Welcome to the Game!” he says, with a smile. A greeting which you’ll later discover to be entirely false. You see, Tommy the Turtle – the game’s mascot – doesn’t care about you. I’d argue he probably only has a passing interest in word puzzles at the most. This shelled charlatan is in it for the money and make no mistake, you don’t end up with a pot belly like his without skimming a few golden coins off the top for yourself.
Guess it 1st is based largely on the pen and paper game of hangman, but with slightly fewer references to capital punishment. You’ll need to guess a word or a phrase by first selecting letters that you think may be included and seeing if they stick. If you were correct in your assumption (likely to be a shot in the dark during the early stages) then the letter will appear on-screen replacing one of the blank spaces. You know how this works – pick the wrong letter and you get a penalty; get too many penalties and you fail the puzzle.
The big difference between playing hangman with a friend and playing this game on an iOS device (other than one being a little more anti-social), is that Guess it 1st would like you to spend money at some point. The core game is free-to-play and so the dreaded in-app purchasing system makes an inevitable appearance allowing you to purchase golden coins in exchange for real money. However, you do also earn these coins as you play and surprisingly I never felt like I actually needed the extra funds. That’s really not something I expected to be able to say.
My only real complaint is that you do have to spend ten of those gold coins for every vowel you want to use, and you sometimes only receive five coins for completing a puzzle. That’s harsh. Can you imagine playing hangman without running through all the vowels immediately? I’d be at a loss for words.
Version Tested: iPhone. Played for 2 hours.
