What's this? Hank Green bought part of a mobile game company because he really enjoyed playing a demo? And now 10% of all profits from that game will be given away to various charities? Well, okay, I guess I'm downloading that when it launches! And so I did 😁
Gubbins is "another" a word game, but a pretty novel one. It's a bit like Scrabble had an illegitimate child with Patience (the classic card game). You get dealt a stack of letter tiles – some already combined in (mostly) unbreakable sequences – and have to arrange these on a board to make words. The longer the words, the higher the score. But you can only see the tiles at the bottom of the stack (like Patience, the others are all turned to face the "table" until they are fully revealed) and some tiles are actually "Gubbins", strange creatures that might help or massively hurt your strategy. Words are only scored when you swipe them off the board (so you can't use letters more than once, unlike Scrabble), and clearing more words at once will get you combo scores. So whilst it's a simple initial premise, the developers have done a great job layering on additional complexities and mechanics.
I think it's great. The art style is very retro-quirky – if reminds me a lot of the Beatles classic Yellow Submarine film – and the humour is, well, very Hank Green 😂 It does annoy me that quite a lot of relatively common words are simply missing from the game's dictionary, though. And the Gubbins are equal parts clever chaos and deeply frustrating. There's little you can do to counteract a hostile Gubbins, and the more you play the game, the more of these you unlock. Sure, you also unlock some beneficial blighters, but the good Gubbins seem much weaker overall, whilst the later-level bad Gubbins are almost overpowered. Perhaps I haven't got round to some of the S-tier good guys yet, but it does mean the game gets more annoying as you level up, which is a shame.
The result is something which I was thoroughly enjoying until I just... wasn't any more. I still pick it up from time-to-time, but it fell out of my daily rotation very quickly. A weird part of that is the fact I bought it fully, bonus pack and all. You'd think that would be a good thing, but actually the bad Gubbins that added are some of the worst, and being able to play it infinitely actually sucked some of the fun out of it. On the other hand, being restricted to one game a day also sucked. I think the sweet spot here would be a "one a day" system that rolls over. I see that they want people to buy the game, but from a purely competitive/addictive point of view, I think it fails to hit the right balance.
Still, if you like word games, this is definitely worth a look.