Zynga launches New Words With Friends

Five years on from the release of the original, Zynga has updated one of the smartphone’s most successful properties.

New Words With Friends brings with it a number of additions, chief of which is a solo-player mode for offline play that sees users squaring off against AI opponents.

The game is free to download but does carry banner ads – that is, unless you’ve previously paid for the last version, in which case they will be automatically disabled. Current games will carry over too.

Also new is Community Match, where players can browse a list of potential opponents with information on their skill level, as well as their location and photo (if they allow it).

There’s also an in-game dictionary and lots of new stat-tracking functions.

The game has since its original launch hosted over 55m matches with 58bn words and 217bn letters having been played and 1.2tr points scored. 5,478 words have only ever been played once.

We want to thank our millions of loyal players who are the reason we’ve reached this incredible milestone,” Zynga said. Thank you for playing and we can’t wait to spell out our next milestone with you.”

Here’s an infographic about it all: