I usually rankle when someone posts to MathsJam something that isn’t really MathsJam related - there’s been a spate of people in the USA who seem to think it’s aimed at primary school children, posting the sort of pathetic “If 2=4…” puzzles that plague Facebook. (Note: if 2=4, anything follows.)

So, when @anadromeo tweeted this:

… I prepared to rankle. But I clicked anyway.

Anadrome is actually quite lovely: a variant on Scrabble, with the extension that you can form words in any direction you like – which means, for example, playing STOP would also score points for POTS. There’s also a wider variety of bonus tiles – ones which multiply just the consonants, others just the vowels, some which mean your tile scores are multiplied together rather than added, some which score 100… it makes for a much less predictable game than Scrabble, or Words with Friends, or other similar games.

There are boards very similar to those games; boards where long words attract big bonuses, and others where a lucky set of tiles can score what the game says is an infinite number of points (although, in reality, it’s simply a larger number than the code can handle).

You can also design your own boards, which is tougher than it appears.

I have a few quibbles about the board playability (the odd dragging bug), the bot (which is too good a player to compete with enjoyably) and instructions (it’s not obvious, for example, that you double-click to zoom in) which I feel a little churlish mentioning, as it’s a free game I enjoy greatly.

Try it at anadro.me – I play under the name of Impala Koala.