PopCap Games announces the release of Bookworm for mobile phones in North America and the UK. Bookworm has done really well on the BlackBerry since its release back in April. The controls for Bookworm mobile have been stream lined to make them easy to use on mobile phones.

“Bookworm is very well suited for mobile phones because it can be played in short bursts of a minute or two whenever and wherever the opportunity arises,” said Andrew Stein, director of mobile business development at PopCap. “At the same time, the game also offers a great challenge for marathon word-builders since it’s essentially infinite in its replayability. We’ve streamlined and optimized the controls so that playing Bookworm on a phone is even easier than via a mouse or keyboard. And the game now references the Oxford English Dictionary, so even the most inveterate ‘lexophile’ will be satisfied.”

Bookworm is a fun word puzzle game. The board is a jumble of letters and the players must make as many words as possible from the jumble of letters. As you complete words, those tiles disappear from the board and are replaced by new tiles that come down from the top of the board. The challenge is dealing with the different letters that arise. There are scorch letters that sink to the bottom much faster than normal letters. If the scorch letters reach the bottom of the board, the game is over.

Press Release Follows:

SEATTLE, Washington – November 21, 2007 — PopCap Games, the leading developer and publisher of casual games, today announced the immediate availability of its hugely popular game Bookworm™ for a wide array of cell phones in North America and the United Kingdom. Originally launched for Web and PC play in 2003, and the recipient of numerous accolades including “Puzzle Game of the Year” from Games for Windows magazine (nee Computer Gaming World), Bookworm has been a resounding success on BlackBerry since becoming available for that handheld device in April of this year. Bookworm is the second mobile game PopCap has developed internally, and is available today from T-Mobile in the UK and all major mobile carriers throughout North America.

“Bookworm is very well suited for mobile phones because it can be played in short bursts of a minute or two whenever and wherever the opportunity arises,” said Andrew Stein, director of mobile business development at PopCap. “At the same time, the game also offers a great challenge for marathon word-builders since it’s essentially infinite in its replayability. We’ve streamlined and optimized the controls so that playing Bookworm on a phone is even easier than via a mouse or keyboard. And the game now references the Oxford English Dictionary, so even the most inveterate ‘lexophile’ will be satisfied.”

In Bookworm, players must build words from contiguous letter tiles on a grid. Longer and more difficult words score more points and produce a variety of “gem tiles” that offer additional bonuses (and mega-bonuses when multiple gem tiles are used in a single word). Burning tiles sear through normal tiles, reaching the bottom of the grid more quickly; they must be used before they reach the bottom or the game ends. With the new mobile version, players have the option to control the selection of letter tiles via d-pad/cursor, triple-tap or predictive text entry, such that the game controls are streamlined specifically for on-the-go play.

Key features of Bookworm Mobile include:

• Classic and Action game modes with all the game-play of the award-winning PC version
• Vocabulary of up to 140,000 words based on the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary
• Historical tracking of all-time highest scoring as well as longest words, enabling players to compare their personal bests to friends’ all-time best words and scores
• Choice of 3 input methods (two of which are unique to mobile) to optimize experience on the mobile phones