Game Review - Nomia 1.2
by Carol Bruml
Nomia 1.2, by Sphera Software, contains a variety of word-search type games, of varying sizes, some of which are timed and some of which are not. Each offers several levels of difficulty, though I saw little difference between "easy" and "hard" for the games in which I tried both. The interfaces are simple and intuitive; I never found rules for any of the games, but never felt I needed them. (If you want to know what a button signifies, hover the mouse over it, and it will tell you.)
Quick Game is un-timed, on a 6 x 6 letter board. As you make words, the letters you use disappear and the tiles above them fall into their places. If you empty a whole column, the columns to the right move in. You can rotate the game to the right or left, in order to better visualize it, and you can switch positions of tiles, two at a time; however, there are only a limited number of times that you can use these options before they become greyed out. The object is to try to eliminate all of the tiles completely. I have not managed that. I liked this game a lot more than Boogled, and am prone to playing it if I have time to open Nomia.
Word Search is just like it sounds, except that you do not need to find words in a straight line. You can again use any series of adjacent letters, up, down, sideways or diagonal. You are not timed. Tiles do not drop or move. You cannot switch places of tiles. If I am going to do this, I prefer the extra interest of the dropping tiles in Quick Game. Boogled, similar to Boggle, opens a 4 letter x 4 letter array, and is timed. You can find words by drawing lines with your mouse in any direction, including diagonals, but all letters have to be adjacent to one another in some direction. The games automatically end after 180 seconds, and the last ten are counted down with a clicking timer that I found very distracting. Bad enough to be timed, without having your concentration destroyed!
Attack will remind you of Tetris, in a way. You start out with a 10 x 10 array of letters, and as you pick words from them, again in any direction, the letters in those words disappear. The trick here is that additional letters keep dropping down from the top, ever changing the supply you have to work with. The speed at which the new letters come is slow enough that the game can still be rather relaxing, once you get used to the constant change of letters. The rate at which they fall appears to be constant, but also never-ending. You can swap pairs of tiles and can use the "bomb" to remove single tiles altogether, but you lose points when you do so; I did not see a limit on how many times you can do these maneuvers. You can use words of as few as two letters and can use the same word more than once. Proper nouns are not acceptable. I think scoring is reminiscent of Scrabble, with higher scores for longer words; I did not notice if scoring differed depending upon which letters were used. I don't think you can "win" this game; I think you play until you decide to end it. Attack is not timed. It is my favourite of Nomia's game options.
Full Game is like Quick Game, but with a bigger board, or Attack, without the dropping tiles. It is not timed. You start with a 10 x 10 array of letters and need to find as many words as you can within them. The letters in the words you complete disappear, and the tiles above move down. If you empty a column completely, the tiles to the right shift left to fill the space.
Web Game supposedly lets you download and play the latest game from Sphera's site, on the web. However, if I tried to open this game, I got an "address not found" message. The web site states that "Nomia will feature internet integration," so perhaps this is not available yet.
Time Trial gives you only 90 seconds to get as many words/points as possible. I don't particularly like the tension of playing against the clock, so I did not try this.
Nomia includes advanced game-generation features that I did not explore. These let you manipulate the rules, in order to play the type of game you want to play.
If you like word search puzzles, then Nomia is a good game for you, and the price is right. The interface is nicely drawn, the sound effects are appropriate and (usually) subtle enough not to be intrusive. I would probably give it four stars out of five, overall... and perhaps it deserves more. It did not grab me, but word search puzzles usually do not.
Nomia requires Mac OS X, 10.1.5 or higher. A license costs US $9.95. http://www.sphera-soft.com/nomia.html Carol Bruml, is editor of Mouse Tales, the monthly newsletter of the North Coast Macintosh Users Group of Ohio, December 2003
