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It comes as no surprise that Zynga, the makers that brought us Words with Friends, has released another fantastic casual gaming experience. This time around you’re hanging up your letter tiles in Matching with Friends and trading them in for colored tiles instead.

Where Words with Friends may determine who has a better vocab, Matching with Friends puts the emphasis solely on strategy. In Matching with Friends you’ll have three rows made up of three colored tiles. The colors are random and it’s up to you to lay them down on the board and try and connect three or more matching colors using the pieces on your board as well as the ones in your hand. Each time a match is made, those tiles will vanish which at times leaves a cluttered mess of unused tile. By placing tiles on multipliers (just like Scrabble and Words with Friends) or connecting more than three matching colors will ramp up your score. This is only part of the strategy.

The rest of the strategy is determining when and how to use a bomb (you can only use it twice per game) that’ll destroy any tiles blocking your path, how to use star tiles that can stay on the board forever and be used as any color, to swapping out your group of tiles for new ones by using coins. Now this is the only downside to Matching with Friends. You can purchase these coins thru IAP which translates to whom ever spends the most money has the best chance of wining. Not cool in my book.

Like previous Zynga games, how this is played is that one person will make a move and then you’ll make your more and repeat this a total of ten times. Matching with Friends also uses the fantastic casual pacing of Words with Friends (also seen in their other titles) where you can take a turn in one game, jump out while waiting for the person to take their turn and jump into another game. You can actually juggle twenty games at once if you want to.

The Bottom Line: 10/10 (Amazing!)

Zynga has done it again. This time around they test your strategy skills. You can either play this for free or spend a few bucks so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get in on the action.