How To Win & Pwn Your Friends at Hanging With Friends Part 1: Building the Puzzle

I’ve been obsess with word games lately, and other than Words With Friends (which i wrote about earlier), my latest addiction is Hanging With Friends. This game is pretty simple, the concept is the same as Hangman where you play a word, and your opponent try to figure it out. Unlike Words With Friends, the game isn’t available on Facebook (web) but it only available on Android or iOS devices.
The game consisting of two important element, first is building a puzzle for your opponent, and the second one is to solve the puzzle given to you. I will separate this to two posts where each element will be cover separately with how to play a good game and as well as how to cheat.

Hanging With Friends Part 1: Building the Puzzle

What’s Your Strategy: Score vs Difficulties

Every Hanging With Friends game started off with one building a puzzle for their opponent to solve.
There are different strategy that you can play, and depends on how you want to play it (what you are trying to accomplish on that round of the game), you use different strategy.

A good game on Hanging with Friends don’t always need to beat your component and let him lose one life, sometimes collecting more point might be able to save your life on the next game!

Just like in Words with Friends, there are a special space in the 8 letter spaces that you get, the same Double/Triple Words/Letter space will show up on the board that let you have an opportunity to score higher. The score you collected throughout all the games (not specific to one game) will gain you Coins. Every 200 points will give you 20 coins, and 20 coins will buy you one hint. It is always good to have some coins in your game, where you will get to use it to help you when you face a though game.

When you are playing a game where you are trying to score as much as possible, it very much depends on your luck. The major factor will be what special space you got, and where it is located.

When you get such a Double/Triple Letter Space on your board, first try to figure out out of the 12 letters pool you got, which tiles award you with most points. Have in mind two of the most marks tiles and try to build the word where the tile is located on the special space and have more marks.
And if you are so lucky to get a Double/Triple Word Space on your board, just try to make the word long enough until you got to the special space and get your bonus points.
But sometimes things doesn’t goes that well. A triple letter space located at the 7th and 8th space doesnt do you any good, or you just want more points from one game, well, the tips below might be able to help you.

1. Longer word = more points. Try adding ED or S or ING if possible.
2. Adding prefix letter like RE, UN, DE, IN if you so happened to have those in your pool.
3. TIPS: U gives you 2 points while other vowel gives you only 1 point.
4. Z, Q, X, J, V and K give you more points than other tiles. Use them whenever possible

Building a Good Puzzle at Hanging With Friends

Points might seems important if you need it desperately to buy the hint, but it will not ensure you to win a game, building a good complex puzzle is the key to success.

1. Keep in mind that the last vowel is given to your opponent for free. So building a word with a vowel at the back is much more better than one with it in front. If your opponent saw the free vowel is offered on the 2nd letter of a 5 or 6 letter words, that eliminate a lot of possibilities and he might be able to figure it out easily.
2. Try not to use the same letter twice in a word. It makes the puzzle easier to solve since your opponent has one less letter that he/she need to figure it out. And also, not a good idea to use a vowel twice, especially your last vowel of the word.
3. Minimize the number of vowels in the word. Everyone will try to guess vowels first in a long word, and a long word will have less strikes. If this done right, there is a high chance that you will win that round.
4. NO VOWELS? Yea, no vowels might be a good trick to play, but a dangerous one. Because it is not hard to figure out a word with no vowels in it, but the newcomers to the game (or your careless friends) will get tricked and still attempt to try A E I O U in the word and that will cost them 5 strikes. (I had did that once when I was new to the game, and i suppose my opponent is LOL when he/she saw that in the replay)
5. Play a long word. By playing a long word and your opponent will have less strikes. Add RE, UN, DE, IN in front of your word or S, ED, ING at the back of the word to make it longer.
6. Play a short word. Short word might seems easier to figure out but your opponent will stumble across letters in long words much more often than they will in short words.
7. Build short word that uses consecutive vowels like ?OU?, ?EO? or ?OI?. Double vowels words are generally harder to figure out.

How to CHEAT

Sometimes you just cant find a good word while building your puzzle, or whatever reason that you allow yourself to cheat, here are my “recommended” way to cheat.
Anagram is your best friend. My favourite anagram tool, and also is most suitable for this game will be Internet Anagram Server.
Step by step?
1. Go to Internet Anagram Server page and use its Advanced Anagramming search.
2. Fill up the form as shown in the picture (or the instruction below)

Maximum number of words in each anagram: 1
Minimum number of letters in each word: 4
Maximum number of letters in each word: 8
Show candidate word list only: YES
The rest of the fields left blank or as default.
3. Enter all the 12 tiles into the Word/phrase to be anagrammed box
4. Press the Find Anagram button.
5. ???????
6. Profit

Yea, whats the ??????? part you might ask, I suggest you follow some of the tips above mentioned earlier in the post while choosing the perfect word, and hopefully you’ll be good to go.

Thats all for the Building the Puzzle part of the post. If you are interested in getting more tips and trick for Hanging With Friends, especially for the Solving the Puzzle part, click here to the post.

If you have more tips or questions for us, leave it in the comments.

Happy Hanging.