According to Wikipedia, Scrabble sets are found in roughly 1/3 of American homes. I don’t doubt that, as I often played it growing up. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get people together to play a board game, and that’s where Facebook comes in. Being able to play with friends, family, and strangers all over the world means it’s easier than ever to play a game of Scrabble.

Quarrel combines gameplay elements from Scrabble, Jumble, and Risk to create a vocabulary strategy game where you use your word knowledge in order to take over the opposition’s territories and achieve world domination. Players control territories filled with troops such as cavemen, ninjas, pirates, robots, aliens, G.I.’s and more who are used in battle to create words out of an eight-letter anagram.

This week on the App Store there are a ton more games, but that’s not all. I also found a number of great utilities: more location tracking, a translator from the future and a great news app. And, as always, a decent number of these are limited time freebies. Grab ‘em while they’re free.

You can play Scrabble the old fashion way, on the go, on your iPhone, with cards, and with dice. Now, you can play it on your iPad, too, and there are plenty of reasons why you’d want to. The screen is big enough to not require zooming, you don’t have to (physically) set much of anything up, and you can play over the net with your friends on Facebook. But are Scrabble for iPad’s improved graphics enough to make it that much better than Words with Friends HD or even Scrabble for iPhone?

Scrabble. There, I said it. Words with Friends HD is very much like the popular word game entitled Scrabble. What’s the difference? Honestly, not much that you’d notice except its fresh take on graphics. The rules are basically the same, and they even say the game rules are “simple and familiar.” The biggest difference is the placement of tile multipliers on the board (the corner is no longer the place to be).

Hey, remember MacSoft? I think I do, too. They were this kick-butt Mac gaming company, and then they fell in with the Destineer crowd, and then suddenly stopped hanging around with us. Well, they’re now back at the door, but is it with the Unreal Tournament 3 game they promised Mac gamers back in 2007? No. It’s with games you likely already have in your closet anyway. This month, MacSoft is bringing Scrabble, Monopoly Here & Now Edition, and Game of Life: Pathway to Success to the Mac as part of their Board Game Trio 2.

Yes, and it’s about time we put it out of its misery. Even before the iPhone, the iPod never stood a chance as a legitimate gaming device. This saddens me somewhat, too, because I really wanted it to be. I viewed gaming on the iPod much as I do on my Macintosh, in that I didn’t buy a Mac to play games, but if there are games available, I’ll certainly play them. Unfortunately, developers just never put much thought into iPod games, and Apple didn’t seem interested in helping out.

Find out what went wrong—and what’s starting to look right—after the break.