Fayetteville Resident Selling Wordigo App in iTunes Store

By Lana Flowers

Philip Zweig can tease your brain and tie it in knots.

Zweig has an iPhone app for his Wordigo board game that was released in 2003.

Wordigo is an iPhone word game that is similar to doing a crossword puzzle but without clues such as “Hotel heir/actress. Famous for being infamous.”

The puzzle designs itself as users fill in words. Players must build more words on the letters already in place.

It gets more difficult as the game progresses. Ever try to make a five-letter word ending in I and using only the letters J, X, P and D, which are all you have left in the unused virtual letter tiles?

The iPhone Wordigo app was released in October.

“It’s been an exciting ride from conception back in 2001 to seeing the app version,” Zweig said.

He donated 70 cents of the sale of each 99-cent Wordigo app to the Northwest Arkansas Food Bank through December. Now, Zweig is letting the app sell in the iTunes store and recouping some of his investment and development costs.

“Apple takes 29 cents of each sale. The nice thing about it, I look at the weekly sales report and see how it is going. It is less than 100 downloads per month,” Zweig said.

However, he does not advertise, so many of those downloads likely come through word-of-mouth as Wordigo users show the game to their friends and family.

A single user can play Wordigo or there is a daily puzzle feature that allows users to compete against others online.

Zweig said a Wordigo update is pending, which will add features similar to those in the computer game version and offer hints and tips that help make it easier to form words. When the update is released, he plans to ramp up advertising and donate some proceeds to charity again.