'Tis the Season: Mobilityware's Hangman provides four themes, including a Christmas one, where a snowman has a date with the gallows.A quick refresher course, if you've forgotten: one player picks a word (either at random, or a word in a category), and puts short dashes on a piece of paper where the letters should be. Five blanks, it's a five-letter word. Eight blanks, it's an eight-letter word. The other player then guesses individual letters to spell the word, Each correct guess goes in the appropriate space; each incorrect guess earns you a body part of the person -- usually a stick figure. In a typical game, the doomed figure might have six parts -- a head, spine, two legs, and two arms. If the stick figure is drawn before you figure out the word, you're "hung."

Another variation of the game is to allow the players to "build" part or all of the gallows, which provides more chances. The three hangman games reviewed here provide six chances (just the doomed), seven (the doomed and a noose), and 11 (a four-part platform, the noose, and the doomed) guesses.

Of the three games we reviewed, both my seven-year-old daughter and I enjoyed Hangman 1.7 the most. version stands out because it enables you to select from four nifty graphical themes (stick man, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas), and separately select from 16 word lists. (List topics include: standard, easy, sports, celebrities, movies, ESL, and Spanish.)

Like other hangman applications, Hangman 1.7 enables you to choose to play in either single- or two-player mode. Two-player mode is much like the traditional game, with each player typing in a word for her opponent to solve and the first player first solving (or failing to solve) her puzzle before the next player gets a turn. Both players "win" or "lose" independently of how the other player does; taking fewer turns than your opponent to solve a puzzle doesn't give you the win in the eyes of MobilityWare. But of course it's easy enough to keep track on your own.

A standout feature of Hangman 1.7 is that when you solve the puzzle, or when you lose and the word is revealed, you have the option to touch a question-mark icon. That flips the screen over to the word's definition on the dictionary.com Web site. When you're finished reading the definition, you tap a Done button to return -- without a hitch -- to the game. This is a nice trick, as many iPod touch and iPhone applications take you to the Web via the device's built-in Safari browser, forcing you to quit Safari and relaunching the original program if you want to go back to that app.