Until you've mugged a minotaur with the word 'gazebo' or murdered a mummified hound with the word 'dodecahedral' you really haven't experienced BA at its satisfying, surreal best. Fantastic! Astounding! Awesome! Finish a foe off with a whopping word wallop and you get to watch a slow-motion coup-de-grace animation, and oooh and aaah and as your letter grid fills up with powerful diamonds and rubies. Smash an enemy with a mammoth gem-packed mouthful and Lex utters an extravagant compliment.

The real pleasure and challenge however comes from vanquishing opponents with ventricose verbiage. By bombarding a beast with a string of four or five-letter words you will eventually whittle its health down to zero and roll on to the next screen. With a choice of sixteen letters, even the littlest lexicographers are going to be able to make (slow) progress through the (early) stages of the game. When BA isn't making you titter, it's making you think, or feel good about yourself. Polysyllabic pummelling 'I', 'N', and 'G' tiles are a bookworm's best friends. Not since Psychonauts has a PC title made me giggle girlyly on such a regular basis. For a game that makes no great comic claims, the humour is amazingly dense and well-crafted. Every screen brings a new, unique adversary, a new speech-bubbled wisecrack, or amusing Hitchhiker's Guide-style 'monster lore' comment. The first of three campaigns throws hero Lex into a colourful cartoon world inspired by Greek mythology. PopCap lures you from location to location with a string of imaginative monsters and loads of witty banter. In the time it takes to fish out the resulting biscuity sludge you'll be well and truly hooked. In the time it takes a dunked digestive to disintegrate in a mug of hot tea you will have learnt the basics. Potions and gem tiles received as rewards for spectacular blows allow him to regenerate health, remove curses and boost attacks with poison, ice and flames.

Magic items picked before a mission endow your annelid avatar with special powers. War of wordsīA is an irresistible turn-based side-scrolling combat game where you smite enemies by building words (the bigger the better) from a random selection of sixteen letter tiles. I'm not in a position to verify any of these claims but - and this might be pure coincidence - I have noticed that my athlete's foot seems a little better and my piles slightly less itchy since I started playing the brilliant Bookworm Adventures.

If PopCap's faintly sinister 'player profile' page is to be believed, playing its games on a regular basis will improve your reflexes, sight and memory, and help you cope with stress, autism, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis and addiction.

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