Lexica

Lexica is an open-source word-puzzle game initially developed by Peter Serwylo as a fork of Lexic. The game is primarily centered around finding words in a jumble of letters; you have a grid of letters, and you must find words using the jumbled mess. To form words, you'll choose a letter and then drag your finger to the neighboring letters until the combination of all highlighted letters form a word.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

"A word game where players find as many words as possible on a grid of random letters with a time limit."
- F-Droid description of the game

Lexica is an open-source word-puzzle game initially developed by Peter Serwylo as a fork of Lexic. The game is primarily centered around finding words in a jumble of letters.




Installation

The game can be obtained on Google Play Store, F-Droid, or GitHub. For this review, we downloaded the latest version of the game as of the time of review, version 3.13.1, from F-Droid. The size of the game is 13.6 MB during download and 23 MB after install, which is decently small. During our installation from F-Droid, we did not encounter any issues.




Gameplay



Lexica's gameplay is simple and ubiquitous, as mentioned by our interview respondent who had seen similar games often on the Google Play Store: you have a grid of letters, and you must find words using the jumbled mess. To form words, you'll choose a letter and then drag your finger to the neighboring letters until the combination of all highlighted letters form a word. However, it is not that simple as you only have a limited time (three minutes by default) to find as many words as you can. Depending on the game setup, you will be awarded points based on either one of these two criteria:

  1. If Word Length is chosen as the scoring type, you will earn a point for every letter used in a word; longer words net more points.
  2. If Letter Points is chosen as the scoring type, you will earn a certain point for using certain letter, so some letter nets you more point than others.
From the interview we conducted, our respondent mentioned that the game is fun and really challenging for the brain. The game is also easy to get into, though difficult to master.




Graphics


The graphics of the game is overall very simple, almost utilitarian. The game's appearance is basically like a regular Android app that follows material design guideline. The game also offers very little customization in graphics, as the only option is to enable or disable light mode.


There is not much to say about the game's graphics. It works, but that's it. Our respondent also did not say much about the graphics besides mentioning that "it is simple."




Multiplayer


The game offers the ability to multiplayer through a web link; simply share the link to your friend, and you'll be able to play Lexica together.


The game also features the ability to play multiplayer from the web browser, so if your friend is on a non-android device or is unwilling to install Lexica, you can play together in a browser.




Audio


The game only has two sound effects, which is disabled by default, that play when you either inputted a correct or incorrect word. The sound effect is rather loud, and our respondent mentioned that the sound effect is a bit too scary for the game.




Customizability



Lexica only offers limited customization. You can choose the language of the words in-game (which does not affect UI language), the provider of word definition (for the word definition lookup feature), and enabling or disabling sound effects.


Aside from that, you can also choose which game modes you want to play; the game has four game modes by default, but you can make your own with custom name, time limit, board size, scoring type, minimum word length, and hints.




Verdict


Lexica is a nice, simple, and free and open source alternative for a "find a word from a letter" games, which tends to be quite popular, especially on mobile devices. It may be functionally and graphically simple, and it is not that flashy compared to its commercial alternatives, but the game still serves its job as an entertainment.




External Links




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