Players take turns building words crossword-puzzle style in a manner similar to the classic board game Scrabble.

Released in July 2009, Words with Friends is available for cross-platform play on devices running the operating systems Android, Windows Phone, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch).

The different arrangement of premium squares can lead to scoring situations that would be rare or impossible in a typical Scrabble game.

The game also ends if three scoreless moves (i.e., passes or tile exchanges) are played in succession, unless the score is zero-zero.

In 2016, Zynga (temporarily) removed a feature called "hindsight" which allowed a player to pay for the opportunity to see what the highest-scoring moves on the board were after the play was made, but has since brought it back.

The word list used by the game is based on the Enhanced North American Benchmark Lexicon (ENABLE), with some additions from the developers.

In 2009, Megan Lawless, of Chicago, began a game with a random opponent, Jasper Jasperse, who lived in the Netherlands.

Others include Draw Something, a CityVille edition of Monopoly, and several kids' games based on FarmVille.

[18] In October 2019, it was announced that the hack of social game developer Zynga had compromised the details of 218 million Words with Friends accounts.