This is where I tend to spend most of my Spelltower time, because the difficulty is in strategy rather than speed. Puzzle Mode is more fiendish, adding an entire row of letters each time you make a word, and it's game over when the tower hits the top. In Tower Mode there are simply 150 tiles, no time limit or pressure, and the goal is to score high: this is the one where it's acceptable to just stare at the screen for a few minutes. This is what you're doing in all of Spelltower's five modes, which includes Tetris-inspired local multiplayer, where the pressure is really ratcheted up. I know this makes me sound dozy (136 pts), but really I'm just sad (12 pts). You rue (9pts) your sad (12pts) vocabulary and get a goosy (160 pts!) prickle whenever something like botanic (252 pts!) crops up, but the rest of the time is spent discovering that Zora is not, in fact, a word, and that while you may wish to "pwn" this grid you'll often only pone (24 pts) it by guessing. You may think you have a gene (20 pts) for this kind of thing, but soon you're sat (9 pts) looking at a set (9 pts) and feeling like a bit of a dope (18 pts). This does not make things easy, which is Spelltower's first big jolt (84 points!) The basic layout is a grid made up of letters, and you can link any letter to any surrounding it in order to trace out words: backwards, diagonals, everything's up for grabs. Spelltower's chic and colourful style pulls you in, and soon it's swallowing hour upon hour of your time. The point of justifications like this, of course, is that they let you play games and feel good about it. That if you spend enough time scoring big in Spelltower, a transmogrification will slowly take place and eventually you'll wake up as Stephen Fry. It's not that they necessarily educate or improve the vocabulary of players, but there's some optimistic part of your brain that thinks they might. Most games are divorced entirely from real-world skills, but word puzzles operate in a hinterland. Your finger, almost trembling, traces out the word. And then suddenly you'll realise that going over to a T then reversing can DETOXIFY a giant segment of the board. This is a game where you won't touch the screen for minutes at a time, staring fruitlessly at a jumbled layout of letters that seem to contain nothing at all. It may sound like an annex of Hogwarts, but Spelltower offers its own breed of magic.