When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works

Home / Reviews / Apps and Games / App of the Week: Countdown – The Official TV Show App review

App of the Week: Countdown – The Official TV Show App review

Letters! Numbers! Conundrums! No trace of Nick Hewer! It’s App on your Phone Does Countdown!

Since Channel 4’s birth, back in 1982, Countdown has glued itself to a mid-afternoon slot and refuses to budge.

Over 6000 episodes have aired, enthralling an avid audience of pensioners, stay-at-home parents, skiving freelancers, and bleary-eyed students attempting to eat breakfast. Its good-natured mix of anagrams and maths — each round played against a strict 30-second time limit — would seem ideal fodder for an officially licensed mobile game; and so it proves to be with the imaginatively titled Countdown – The Official TV Show App.

Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick!

Tick! Tick! Tick! Tick!

Fire up the app and you can delve into a full 15-round game of Countdown. There are 10 letters rounds (make the longest anagram from nine vowel and consonant tiles blind-selected by a player), four numbers rounds (get closest to a random three-digit value, using six numbers, again blind-selected), and the conundrum (buzz-in when you crack the brain-bending nine-letter anagram). Pleasingly, when you select numbers, you can — like on the telly — get ‘one from the top/any other five’, simply by tapping a button, thereby giving you one large and five smaller numbers to work with.

Profile image of Craig Grannell Craig Grannell Contributor

About

I’m a regular contributor to Stuff magazine and Stuff.tv, covering apps, games, Apple kit, Android, Lego, retro gaming and other interesting oddities. I also pen opinion pieces when the editor lets me, getting all serious about accessibility and predicting when sentient AI smart cookware will take over the world, in a terrifying mix of Bake Off and Terminator.

Areas of expertise

Mobile apps and games, Macs, iOS and tvOS devices, Android, retro games, crowdfunding, design, how to fight off an enraged smart saucepan with a massive stick.