A Friendlier “Words With Friends”

So, I’m late to the game but I just started playing Words With Friends yesterday. The first thing that I noticed was how little social activity there was in this game that “With Friends” as part of the title. Here are eight ways I’d improve the game:

1. Create profiles for my friends that I can view to see their activity: recent games, achievements, high scores.
2. Let people create games with multiple people. This seems like one of the most obvious ones. Without this, you could go ahead and call it “Words With Friend”.
3. Let people mark themselves as “Looking To Play”. This status would last a few hours and make it easier to find friends who currently are interested in playing.
4. Color code the tiles so you can see who played which tiles.
5. Make a list of ten or so “Words of the Week” to teach new vocabulary (with definitions). With the list, show friends who have successfully played those words in games and award achievements for playing all of them.
6. Add leaderboards with statistics like average points per word, average points per tile, highest scoring [1-7] tiles, and more.
7. Some people cheat. You can’t remove that but you could build in a dictionary to let people look up questionable words and provide an accessible list of the two letter words. Take advantage and make this a learning opportunity.
8. Build a newsfeed into the front page of the app to list friends’ recent plays. Engage me in their games.

Can you think of any more?