Bonnie's Bookstore is a title developed by Phil Steinmeyer, who you may know better as the man behind Poptop Software, creators of such hits as Railroad Tycoon 2 & 3 and the Tropico series of strategy builder games. This game is obviously a bit tamer than Phil's previous works, but it is no less fun, stylistic and well designed.

Phil takes a simple concept like word searching, adds a light backstory to it, tosses in a couple of game modes and voila - you have a pretty fun game that the whole family can easily pick up and play. While the game may seem, at first glance, only geared towards children (and my Phil's own account of the pre-development focus group he ran) and women, Bonnie's Bookstore actually is fun for everyone.

Bonnie's Bookstore does actually have a backstory which plays out ever so lightly as you play through the fifty boards metered out as chapters in a series of books. The story goes that Bonnie has inherited a Children's Book Store from her Grandfather, and decides it would be fun to run it. After awhile Bonnie longs to do something more fulfilling, and after rummaging through the attic and finding some of her Grandpa's illustrations, she decides to start writing some books. Thus begins the fun.

The object of the game is to link words together, turning them from yellow to green until the entire board is cleared. As you advance through the game things get predominately more difficult and new elements are added to make it more challenging, but basically you're searching out words, earning points and clearing boards. Every time you clear a board you get a slight backstory which shows Bonnie writing a chapter from the book your on.

There's a number of elements you'll run into as you play each board, but the main point of it all is to search out words by linking them together - the longer the word the more points you get, but the least number of letters needed to create a word in the game is three. Players do this, as we already mentioned to turn the entire board green. The key elements are the number of turns you have, your points and the scramble button which allows you to move letters around into different spots (which use up a turn). If you are successful you'll get a score tally and even some bonus points for the number of turns you have left. And that's the crux of the gameplay.

There are other variables that pop up including several kinds of bonuses and detractors you'll encounter as you play. The most obvious is Writer's Block, which simply takes up a space and makes it harder to connect words - these are dealt with by creating words below it to make it fall - drop it enough and it'll drop right off the board.. Then there are wildcards, which give you a consonants or a vowel you can use - there are wildcards that disappears after one use and ones that don't - (the ones that don't are multicolored).

Other interesting elements include the "Cycler" which changes upward in the alphabet (for example, an "A" block would then cycle to become a "B"); Locks - these block your progress, but using a letter next to one in a word will make them disappear and reveal more letters; Then there's reversible blocks which cycle from yellow, to green and then back to yellow again; and the Copycat which changes to the last letter of the word you recently created. There are also blocks in some boards that have to be used twice to turn green, which are used in a handful of the game's boards.

If you want to make things more interesting you can play the Action mode or adjust the difficulty level to spice things up. In the Classic mode there's no time pressures, which means you have more time to think, while in Action Mode you can play any number of words but there's is a time limit which ticks away while you hunt for words. Difficulty levels adjust the time you have but also raise the points you get. And that's pretty much the gameplay in a nutshell. There's also a score board for various modes, which is a certainly something to shoot for the first couple of times you blow though the game.

All in all Bonnie's Bookstore is a word search game with a lot of heart - something you don't see too often in the casual space, no matter what the genre you're talking about. If you like word games then Bonnie's Bookstore is a game that the whole family can try their hand at and have fun with. For $20 it's a B-A-R-G-A-I-N.

You can buy the game directly from New Crayon or from various online game portals like popcap.com , RealArcade and many other locations throughout the Internet.