Apple / games / LETTERPRESS – WORD GAME
REVIEW
Letterpress survived its creator. Solebon kept the lights on.
Loren Brichter's 2012 word game was a design icon. He sold it to Solebon LLC in 2015. Twelve years later it still works — slower, plainer, but recognisably the game iOS designers cried over.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 8, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Letterpress was, in 2012, the kind of game iOS designers wrote about. Loren Brichter — the developer of Tweetie, the man who invented pull-to-refresh — left Twitter and shipped a word game with a tile-locking mechanic so clean it was studied as a design lesson. The animations alone won an Apple Design Award. People talked about Letterpress for years.
In 2015, Brichter sold the game to Solebon LLC, a small Pennsylvania studio better known for its Solitaire products. The version of Letterpress on the App Store today is the Solebon version. The rules are the original rules. The mechanic is the original mechanic. Most of what made the 2012 version a design icon — the typography, the spring-physics tile gesture, the hairline-perfect spacing — has been smoothed into a more conventional iOS design. It’s still a good game. It’s not the same product.
That’s the honest review of any acquired indie classic, and Letterpress is no exception. Solebon has done the responsible thing for twelve years: kept the servers up, added bot opponents to outlive the inevitable decline of a small-game multiplayer service, and resisted the temptation to monetise a beloved one-time-purchase. The rules and the mechanic are the reasons to play. The 2012 magic is, by the nature of the medium, gone — but a maintained game is more than most acquired indies become.
The original was a designer's game. The modern one is a maintained game. Both are real achievements; they're not the same achievement.
FEATURES
Letterpress – Word Game is the asynchronous turn-based two-player word game originally released by Atebits (Loren Brichter) in 2012, acquired by Solebon LLC in December 2015, and currently sold on iOS, macOS, and Google Play. Two players take turns making words from a 5×5 grid of letter tiles; each tile claimed turns your colour; tiles surrounded entirely by your colour are "locked" and cannot be re-claimed. The board is fully claimed in 25 turns max; the player owning more tiles at end-game wins.
Solebon's version of the game is a one-time $2.99 purchase on iOS (occasional sales). There's a free tier with ads and limited concurrent games; the paid tier removes ads, allows unlimited games, and unlocks dictionary modes (Standard, SOWPODS, etc.) and a few additional themes. Bot opponents at three difficulty levels were added by Solebon in 2018 — an addition Brichter's original deliberately did not include.
Cross-platform asynchronous play through Game Center is supported on Apple platforms; the Android version is its own ecosystem and doesn't sync with the Apple side.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The game itself is exceptional and that hasn't changed across owners. The locked-tile mechanic is one of the cleanest pieces of game design any iOS app has shipped, and a single round still produces moments of real strategic thought — the choice between extending into opponent territory versus consolidating your locked region is the kind of small decision that good games are made of. Twelve years on, Letterpress is still the cleanest implementation of that idea on a phone.
Solebon has run the game responsibly. The asynchronous-multiplayer infrastructure works in 2026 the way it worked in 2013. The bot opponents are a thoughtful addition that lets the game survive the inevitable decline of any 12-year-old multiplayer service. The premium pricing structure ($2.99, no IAP, no nagware) is the right shape for a game like this.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Brichter's original Letterpress was, in its 2012 incarnation, an Apple Design Award winner — the typography, the haptic gesture for picking up a tile, the colour-mixing animation. The modern Solebon version preserves the rules but not all of the design polish. The tile animation is plainer. The typography is the developer's choice rather than Brichter's, and on Retina screens it shows.
The Apple-only Game Center synchronisation is the right call but locks Android players out of cross-platform play. Solebon has not announced unification plans and probably never will. The dictionary modes work but the underlying word lists haven't been refreshed since the Brichter era — some 2020s coinages aren't accepted, including some that have been formally added to standard Scrabble lists.
CONCLUSION
Buy Letterpress on iOS if you have a friend or family member who'd play asynchronous turn-based word games with you. Don't buy it expecting the 2012 design experience that won the Apple Design Award — that game shipped, won its prize, and was inherited by a different team with different priorities. The current version is a competent maintenance of a great original. That's not the same thing as a great game today, but it's not nothing either.