We've all seen them: peculiar little boxes sitting in the corner of a pub, giving off an alluring glow from their grimy touchscreens, begging you and your drunken pals to gamble away potential drinking money on largely throwaway games.
Inside these 'itboxes' you'll find a mix of some rather clever and original titles alongside licensed gambling tosh - including various Deal or No Deal titles, complete with Noel Edmonds's beardy face leering into your soul.
Now, the lexical pub game challenge that is Word Soup has made its way onto Android and iOS devices - albeit without the chance to win money.
Lexical brothPlaying out in the same way as the classic pub favourite, Word Soup requires you to string together a line of letters to create a word for points. You can link letters in any direction and chain them together in any order as long as their sides touch.
Different letters are worth different amounts, from one to ten - à la Scrabble - with letters appearing in different colours to help you identify them easily on the board.
There are three modes on offer to enjoy, too: Relaxed, Timed, and Brain. A Relaxed game is exactly that - it's untimed and places no challenges on you other than getting high scores and clearing the board for 500 extra points.
Brain sees you finding longer words for more points, while also getting new titles every time you place down a lengthy word.
Timed is far more like the original title, offering up a race against the clock while you tie together letters. There are also time-boosting letters that let you gain a few extra seconds in your search.
Not quite a Heinz varietyDespite how enjoyable it is to play on the go in short blasts, Word Soup has its problems.
The way you select letters is a little finicky for big fingers. And while sliding across letters to select them is intuitive, it's a little annoying to have to double-tap the final letter to confirm the word submission.
There's an option to switch confirmation off, but this has the unintended consequence of making you accidentally submit words you didn't want to. There's no happy medium, although the problem is considerably less evident on a tablet.
Despite these niggles, Word Soup is a solid enough word game that has served its time on the pub circuit and is available in the infinitely more palatable form of a (slightly overpriced) £1.50 app.