An anagram puzzle game from Martin Sears, presented with the distinct flavor of British educational programming. Don't be fooled by the charming hand-drawn appearance and the curiously twisted vignettes between levels; don't worry if the first few levels seem too basic. This turns into a serious brain-twister.

PictoWords is a casual word game similar to a rebus puzzle — you know the ones, in which you form a word or phrase from pictures and letters. Each round you're offered a selection of square picture tiles, round letter tiles, and a few hints in case you get stuck. It's your job to fill in as many words as you can using both pictures and letters. It's a slightly quirky but very challenging word game that stretches both sides of your brain.

Seek Ver. 0 tasks you with protecting your column of hearts from a stampede of letters sliding in from the right. As letters appear on the conveyor belt, you must quickly find and click the matching letter in the grid below. But if you are too slow, or if you click the wrong letter, one of your hearts will be wiped out.

A game that combines wordplay with Sokoban-style block pushing? Are they mad?!? Arrange blocks with letters to form words by sliding them into place. Luckily, Alphabox recognizes solutions apart from the one intended, so sometimes you can get creative and mix the letters around, saving a few moves. A level editor extends the replay value of this innovative puzzler.

From Kyle Gabler comes an experimental massively multiplayer online word association "game". To play, all you have to do is read the word (or words) on top, then type in the first thing that pops in your head. Human Brain Cloud collects these associations and dumps them into a database viewed with an interactive squishy set of blobs. It's a fascinating experiment that just so happens to be an addictive game to boot.

Countdown is based on one of the longest running game shows in the world, and this Flash game does a good job of staying true to the original game on TV. The game features two contestants battling it out in a game of letters, numbers, and "the crucial Countdown Conundrum." Each round is played against a giant 30-second clock, while the famous Countdown music plays. If you're a game show fan, don't miss this one.

I think many people who frequent this site would agree: Tonypa is one of our favorite casual game designers. Grow Word, his submission to Casual Gameplay's second competition exhibits many of the characteristics that we have come to love about Tonypa's games: it's elegant, understated, and easy to learn but hard to master.

BrainBall is a collection of ten smart-making puzzle games that give your gray matter a workout every day of the month. Featuring logic, number, memory, spatial orientation and many more, BrainBall keeps the same types of games for one month but changes the content every day. Not only is your score kept and compared to other BrainBallers, but you can uh... what's that called? Learn! You can learn, too!

Verbotomy is an online word game where you create words out of a given definition. Each day you're presented with a definition and must come up with an original word to match. You can save your words and build up points towards each round of play. You can also vote on your favorite entries and subscribe to an RSS feed so you can know immediately when a new verboticism is ready and waiting.

I've often thought that Jayisgames doesn't have anywhere near enough word games for my liking, and this almost makes up for that lack. This is a quick, clever Flash crossword puzzle from Taro Ito of Gamedesign.jp, who brought us the recently-reviewed White Jigsaw and other addictive favourites of this site (Dice Wars anyone?), and it lives up to his previous standard.

Halloween Hangman is a simple, cute, and rather amusing Halloween-themed game of hangman. Choose letters from the tiles on screen and try to guess the mystery word or phrase. Make a wrong choice and the smarty-pants skeleton hanging from a rope will hand you a snide comment or two.

The computer game is not the strongest medium for word games. The crossword puzzle and word jumble dominate the papers; Boggle is the board game master. Computer games are often overlooked by the linguistically minded. But then, Text Twist changes all that. I'm tempted to call it the best word game I've ever played.

Ah, the rural life. Nothing but vast expanses of farmland, the occasional sounds of the barnyard animals, and life-shortening, back-breaking manual labor. But Funny Farm, by Igor Naverniouk, is distinctly different than the farmer lifestyle. This word association game starts on the farm, but quickly branches out into greener pastures.

Cyptograma has to be the most appealing interface to a cryptographic puzzle that I have ever seen. The game features quotes and phrases to decrypt from famous people, and are available in either English or Español. Each puzzle is in the form of a simple substitution cipher in which each letter of the phrase is substituted with a symbol. It is up to you to figure out the letter that each symbol corresponds to.

Word Sandwich is a free online Flash game that adds something a little different to the word game genre. The goal of the game is to guess the mystery five-letter word. Simple to play and difficult to master, the game can be highly addictive. Consider yourself warned. The combination of guesswork and alphabetic strategy (with a nice jazzy musical score) grabs you pretty quickly.

Fastr is a multiplayer guess-the-image-tag game similar to the previously reviewed single-player game, Guess-the-Google. Instead, this game makes use of the flickr API to create a well-designed and enjoyable multiplayer experience that can even be rather addictive with a sharp group of people playing.

Remember the typing game, Letters, that was reviewed here in November? Well, the author, Hannu Pelkonen, has released a very significant addition to the series: Words! Though lacking the power-ups of Letters, Words uses the same slick interface and addictive dynamic high score display that updates your rank in real-time while you play.

Another great word game from East of the Web, this one combines the word finding frenzy of Boggle with the scrambled word anagrams of Jumble. 8 Letters in Search of a Word is a race against the clock to score enough points to move on to the next level. Points are...

Just found this excellent collection of word games created in Flash and published by East of the Web. There are currently eight (8) different games to choose from, and each one offers a unique gameplay experience than usual games in its category. CodeWord blends components of guess-the-word games like Hangman with...

From Carnegie Mellon University comes this multiplayer Java applet simply called: The ESP Game. The game requires you to register and sign in, and then it pairs you up with an anonymous partner for a round of ten images. You have two minutes and thirty seconds (2:30) with which to agree...

Word Pads is a new action word game done in Flash with a tropical theme. Similar to games like WEBoggle, except played as a single-player experience, the object of Word Pads is to form English words to score points by clicking on the lily pads in a race against the clock. Words of 3 or more letters are safe, but words of 4 or more letters only scor...

Jumble.com has launched a play-online section that features Jumbles done in Shockwave, with a new one added every day. This version of the classic puzzler adds a timer, scoring, and even a hint feature if you really get stumped. Word puzzles are a good way to keep your mind sharp, and to give your fingers a break from all those button-mashing games.

Why is this game so addictive? Is it because it's easy to find at least a couple of words? It certainly can't be because I always end up at the bottom of the scoring list. Click....