My Hangman

Not so long ago, public executions used to draw crowds. Before the time of Sunday papers and matinee screenings, the bloody destruction of some hapless convict constituted wholesome entertainment.

It's inconceivable now that a newly-devised word game could be so grimly themed. Glu has chosen to skirt around the sticky issue of capital punishment by making My Hangman into a game in which death is only one of a number of consequences of failing to identify a word or phrase.

Thus, accompanying the traditional line-drawings on a blackboard or notepad are amongst others an animated smiling daisy whose petals fall off when you get a letter wrong, a pizza delivery boy whose pizzas keep slipping from the back of his moped, and a balloonist whose balloon gets pecked at by birds and eventually plummets to the ground.

In a nice humanist twist, then, My Hangman is sometimes even about saving lives. Aside, that is, from the lives of your loved ones. Neatly utilising the camera on your mobile phone, My Hangman enables you to take pictures, crop out the heads, and place them in the noose.

This is a nice touch, as are the crisp if unspectacular cartoon backdrops. They bring a Warioware-ish mini-game feel to My Hangman, and manage to inject some personality into a game that tends to serve in the real world as a final fallback in the battle against boredom.

You might have thought that a premise as simple as hangman would struggle to retain your interest. However, Glu has done a good job of spicing it all up.

There are several game modes, including Challenge and Timed Challenge. In these, you can fiddle with the difficulty by choosing how many guesses you get to make, and you can choose the theme of your clues from music, the arts, and sports. Multiplayer mode enables up to eight players to set clues and answers for each other, which adds considerably to the game's longevity.

Surprising erudition is demanded by some of My Hangman's questions. Whilst at the easier end of the general knowledge spectrum you're given helpful clues like 'Fairy Tale' (for when the word is Cinderella), the hints are fairly difficult to read at the sharper end. Did you know, for instance, that Karl Popper is a philosopher, or that Ajax and Perseus are legendary heroes, or that Would I Lie to You is a '90s hit? (Yes – Ed).

My Hangman is beset by a few more niggling problems. Although the 950 words it has in its lexicon are impressively diverse and extensive, the law of probability determines that in your second or third game you're very likely be coming across words from your first outing, and because you can't just skip them the game increasingly becomes a text messaging exercise as you mount up the hours.

Similarly, once you've identified a word, you can't do what you do in real life and end the game by saying what it is. You have to type in the letters, and while worse things do happen at sea, this can become tiresome.

Nevertheless, we can't really grumble about the execution. The inevitable repetition of words may consign My Hangman to the scrapheap before too long, but before then you'll get a giggle from challenging your friends and hanging them, and your general knowledge will be tested to its limits.