After a middling IPO, what's a Zynga to do? Launch another microtransaction fest (also known as a "game"), of course. Zynga has extended its With Friends franchise to a Boggle-alike, called Scramble With Friends for iOS. We're not sure how much inspiration is being drawn from the App Store's existing Scramble Your Friends title, but this whole business model is a little homogenous at this point anyway.

I played a couple games in the app, and lost badly. The free app is littered with ads, but if you pay $2.99 for the full, ad-free version, you're not off the hook yet. See, every round of every game costs a token to play (there are three rounds per game), and of course you have to spend money to get more tokens, unless you want to wait for them to slowly replenish. Plus there are items you can buy to give you an edge that cost tokens as well. Unfortunately for my wallet, the core game of finding words quickly in a grid of letters is actually really fun, sending me back to my family game nights of hyper-competitive Boggle played with paper and pencil. We'll see what happens when my "bonus tokens" start to trickle to zero. I fear the worst. Alec Baldwin doesn't stand a chance.