Huali Fu, Muhammad Mohsin, Jonathan Zhan, Alexander Chong, and Leonard Mah are familiar names to GAMBIT... some of them participated in the GAMBIT Summer Program of 2008, others were interns/freelancers in the Singapore Lab. They've started up their own indie game company, The Dumpling Dimension, and I've been playing their first iPhone game, Bee Spelled, now available on the iTunes App Store!

It's a word search game, but unlike Boggle, letters don't need to be adjacent to make words. If you don't use a letter in one round, it'll stick around for the next. It's up to you to decide which to use and which to conserve. Just the other night I had the letters for "P-U-S-I-L-L-A-_-I-M-O-U-S" and 4 other less-useful characters. This had me agonizing for a while; if you spell short words, you lose your combo multipliers and that lexical masterpiece you've been building up won't have the impact that it could have had.

Long words, however, help you with combat. Your avatar, a bee named Chub, is up against 10 lolcats and spambots. They will chew away at your health bar and you'll have to use green tiles to stay in the game, blue tiles to keep them at bay, and red tiles to dish out additional fire damage. It's a tough balancing act; if you finish off an opponent too quickly, you're losing opportunities to rack up more points, but you can't afford to take too much damage yourself. Completing the game is no big deal, even in hard mode, but finding the right balance of healing and damage to maximize your score gets trickier at the higher difficulties.

You can probably tell I've been playing it a lot. The meme-referencing jokes are funny, possibly a little too contemporary, but hey, software updates may keep the NPC exchanges fresh and up-to-date with the latest 4chan trends. In the meantime, you've got the online leaderboards for competition. It's just a dollar, so if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, check it out!