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I’m a magazine writer and editor in my day job, which means I work with words all day long. Naturally, then, I was drawn to the ultimate iPhone game for the wordsmith – Scrabble. And to sum up the game, Scrabble-style, I’d call it a W-I-N-N-E-R.

At $7.99, it’s not the cheapest game out there, but this Electronic Arts game is well worth the investment. Currently at version 1.0.53, I’ve spent many hours laying down tiles.

The main screen gives you five simple options. You can play the Classic game, with no word count or score limits, or games constrained to a certain amount of points or rounds. There are multiplayer options that you play with a friend, and even statistics that track how often you beat your computer opponent (and, of course, how often you get your own butt kicked). My typical game is against the computer, with a difficulty level of “normal” (the others being “easy” and “hard”). I find normal to be challenging, while “hard” is like playing against William F. Buckley: forget it unless you’re a human dictionary.

The classic game board is presented, and you place a tile by grabbing it from your rack at the bottom of the screen, dragging it onto the board, and releasing. The board automatically zooms in. You can also zoom in and out in typical iPhone style by using the “one-finger, two-finger” method or by pinching in and out. One cool touch: You can shuffle the letters in your rack by shaking the phone.

All the regular board game Scrabble functionality is present: You can exchange all or some of your letters, pass your turn, etc. And it’s nice to have the computer keep score, allowing you to ditch pencil and paper. In the many games I’ve played thus far, I have never had a glitch of any kind. It’s completely stable (at least for me, on my 3G phone.)

Now the big question: Will you love it? It depends – if you already love Scrabble, it’s a natural – and extremely fun – addition to your iPhone game library. You don’t need a live opponent, and the computer does the grunt work. If you don’t love the game, I doubt this version will convince you. But for this journalist, it’s game on.