NEW Game Alert: Word Snatchers

Do you love Lumosity’s Language games? You’re in luck: this week, we launched our sixth Language game, Word Snatchers.

Reminiscent of old-school word scrambles found in newspapers, Word Snatchers presents you with a definition and a collection of letters. Your job is to unscramble the letters to spell out a word fitting the given definition — all before the aliens can descend to snatch the word from you! For instance, you might be asked to find a word for “extolled; praised” from letters ALUEDD. Unscramble the letters quickly — the faster you are, the more points you’ll receive, and the longer it takes, the more risk you run of losing to the aliens. (For the record, the correct answer is LAUDED.)

As you level up, you’ll be challenged to unscramble longer and longer words. Get stuck on a particular scramble? Don’t worry. At the end of each game, you’ll have a chance to review the twelve words and their definitions. Once you make it to Level 4, you’ll be rewarded with a helpful tool: a “shuffle” option. Use this to reshuffle the collection of letters — perhaps if ALUEDD becomes AULDED, you’ll more quickly identify LAUDED.

We settled on an alien abduction theme for the game early in development. Choosing a name, though, proved difficult: our alien theme brought out the team’s own linguistic creativity. Some alternate names include This Spells Trouble, Close Encounters of the Word Kind, and Martian Lingo.

Like three of our earlier Language games — Taking Root, Continuum, and Editor’s Choice — Word Snatchers is a vocabulary proficiency game. Vocabulary proficiency is the ability to understand and use words. The other two games in the category are Word Bubbles, which trains verbal fluency, and Contextual, focused on reading comprehension. We designed these games to give adults of all ages and skill-levels a chance to practice and polish their vocabulary. If you’re interested in digging deeper into your Language games performance, check out the Word Bubbles Insight to discover which of six writers your vocabulary most closely matches.

Ready to take on the aliens? Word Snatchers is now available in the Lumosity Games Library on both web and mobile. And be sure to let us know what you think on Facebook and Twitter!