Molecano Is Taking Over My Life

Molecano key art

There are millions of mobile games out there — from the microtransaction-packed Candy Crush Saga to the full-blown RPG Genshin Impact. Some of them are better than others – Netflix actually has a huge library of great games – but the ones that hook me the most are word games.

When Wordle came out, I was obsessed, to the point of playing dozens of clones just to get my fix. The Guardian’s Wordiply still has me hooked, and others like Wordscapes, Scrabble, and more are frequent parts of my days. There’s a new word game on the market though, and it’s got its hooks into me like nothing I’ve ever played before. It’s called Molecano, and it’s brilliant.

The premise is pretty simple. Your job is to create a path for a mole through a fiery volcano so it can collect fruit and other food and stay well-nourished. To do this, you need to lay down Scrabble tiles, building words from a pool of six letters for each level, and then placing them down to create a path. See it in action in the trailer below.

Mechanically, it’s a cross between Wordscapes and Scrabble, creating words from a set of letters and laying them out like Scrabble, but there’s an extra layer of strategy tying it all together. You’ll want to get the six-letter word – it creates the longest path – but you can’t just plop it down wherever you want. You need to place it strategically, and you need to make sure you can build other words off it to collect all the foods.

Every stage has tiles where you can’t place words too, and you can only place six words, so flooding the field with three-letter words isn’t really viable. It’s so incredibly clever that it’s hard to believe nobody’s done it before.

In terms of monetization, it’s not that bad either, especially for a mobile game. After the first ten stages, you’ll need to watch an ad every few levels to keep playing. You can also watch an ad to get the six-letter word given to you — helpful, but not the entire solution. If you want to remove the ads altogether, it’s a $5.99 purchase, which isn’t too bad given there’s over 400 levels and more on the way.

Molecano is one of the best mobile games in years. If you’re even vaguely interested in word games, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It’s available on both the iOS App Store and the Android Play Store.