We grab land and spell our way to victory in this downloadable anagram game.
E3 2011: Described as a mixture of well-known board games, Boggle and Risk, Quarrel is an upcoming downloadable title that aims to bring the fun of building empires with the challenge of unjumbling letters to form real words.
Each map is divided into coloured islands with up to eight characters on one team per chunk of land. Each of the four players (or you and three AI competitors) take turns attacking and defending by using armies to submit words. At the beginning of each round, eight single letter tiles are introduced with one perfect eight-letter anagram. The team who submits the highest value word wins the round. If you were on the offence you will take control of their property for victory; if you were defending you'll hold your ground and take one of their characters as a prisoner. You can then force your captive to hold up one of your giant letters to earn more points. War is horrible.
There's no timer to contend with as you rack your brain, but by tapping the controller's shoulder button you can further mix up the same letters in hopes of spotting an easy answer. Since both players are working with the same anagram, should both sides submit the same answer, the person fastest to do so wins. Successfully claiming the land of one of your opponents also rewards you with a treasure chest filled with virtual currency and points, which you can then spend on in-game unlockables. Answers need to be real words, no proper nouns allowed, and while the game currently includes multiple dictionaries, coming from UK developer, Denki, some European slang is admissible. The game's American publisher, UTV, hopes that the game's dictionary support will continue to grow beyond simply localising the game for European nations.
Quarrel will support local and online play for up to four players, and when playing solo, each of the game's artificial intelligence has been designed to respond differently. Some AI excel at longer seven- and eight-letter word answers, while some are stronger at high-scoring short words. Maps will come in various sizes, larger landmasses taking longer to play, though UTV hopes to also release additional layouts as downloadable content once it goes on sale.
Final pricing and release date haven't yet been confirmed, but UTV is hoping the title will sell for around $10 when it hits the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Stay tuned for more details on Quarrel soon.
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