Words With Friends is expanding. What was once just a popular way to play unofficial multiplayer Scrabble on mobile has now become a larger hub for other daily word games.
Mobile development juggernaut Zynga announced that it’s added four games to the app. Mini Crosswords gives you a new crossword to complete every day and a leaderboard for competing against other players. Word Wheel is an anagram game where players connect letters in a wheel to form words. Word Search provides a new puzzle theme each day. Finally, Guess Word is like Wordle, with players having to guess a word in six tries.
“Words With Friends has always been about connecting players through friendly competition,” said Yaron Leyvand, executive vice president of mobile games, in a press release. “Our players asked if they could do even more, so we’ve added a whole new layer of personally fulfilling solo minigames where you can disconnect from the world and play word games, with or without friends.”
Before there was Wordle, there was Words With Friends. It launched in 2009, and like other Zynga games at the time, it found success through letting users connect with friends through Facebook. It’s since become one of the most well-known online multiplayer mobile games. There isn’t a chat function, but players can message offline and compete with friends and random strangers. By 2021, the app was a huge partof Zynga’s reported $616 million in Take-Two revenue that quarter.
With this move, Words With Friends is on track to compete with apps like Puzzmo and NYT Games, which bundle together games into one hub that updates daily. There has been a lot of growth in this area, with The New York Times in particular expanding its game offerings with Strands and Connections over the past couple years.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.