This Is What Happens When You Cross Scrabble With Tron’s Light Cycles

The rise of Words with Friends has brought the slow and plodding casual word game genre into the spotlight. With Lexatron, Fictorial‘s Brian Hammond seeks to add a little excitement to the scene with a keen competitive twist.

Rather than trying to fill a board with expensive words, the goal in Lexatron is to make your way across the board as quickly as possible. The secondary goal is blocking the path of player two, making it more difficult for them to complete their word path. If you get blocked, there’s always explosions.

The reason I don’t play Words with Friends or Scrabble that often is because without instituting custom rules the games just meander about directionless until the tiles run out. Mixing familiar word play with a clearly defined goal is a wonderful idea.

We’ll see how well it works out when Lexatron‘s $.99 universal app hits iTunes on October 10.