4 Pics 1 Word

This is the popular new game at our home. It was on my sister Karla's suggestion that I downloaded it to my iPad three or four weeks ago. As the name suggests you look at four pictures and then you figure out one word to describe them all. You are given twelve letters on the bottom of the screen from which you can spell the correct answer, although the words are not often twelve letters long so many of the letters are garbage letters thrown in to confuse you. If you are stuck and cannot figure out a puzzle, you can buy a correct letter or delete some of the garbage letters. When I first started playing I did like to "cheat" and buy letters. Every correct answer gives you 4 points in your bank, but if you buy a hint it costs you 60 points (for a correct letter) or 80 points (to dump a couple of letters). You have to use the rewards from fifteen or twenty correctly guessed puzzles to give you one single hint on a tough puzzle! OUCH! I much prefer to hammer away on my own, but that isn't always the best solution in our household. If no one can figure out the puzzle, then you can't move on and the game becomes very dull. So, in the interests of keeping the attention of my young co-puzzlers, I resort to hints so I can solve it and we can move on to the next puzzle. Jake and Bentley downloaded the game to two other iPads so they can have their own individual score. When you put the game on more than one device, you discover that the puzzles do not upload in the same order for every player. However, the pool of puzzles is the same, so when the boys get stuck on a puzzle they can usually find someone who has solved it already. Of course, we have to remember the answer! The boys have high scores (number of puzzles solved) and large point totals since they don't pay for their hints like I do. Why do I like this game? I've gotten everyone in the household except Evan and Lincoln to play at least a few puzzles. It's a great way for the children to learn vocabulary, synonyms, and homonyms (same spelling but different meanings). They also get practice spelling. Then there is the thinking required to solve a puzzle. You have to use different approaches to solve different puzzles. Sometimes my answers are too general and I have to get more specific, but other times I'm too specific and I need to generalize more. When you look at the pictures, sometimes you are looking for a small item that they all have in common (a bent arm!), but other times it's a theme in common and the pictures themselves are very different. Today I am stuck on this set of pictures: a hand pushing an elevator button, an open book with spirals of magic(?) coming out of it, an old fashioned typewriter, and a girl whispering into another girl's ear. I am going to have buy a letter to move on. After less than a month of playing our household has solved 428 puzzles!