Face Rivals is the silly quiz game with ridiculous consequences!

Players put their face in the game and answer questions in a head-to-head battle of knowledge. The winner of each round gets to “sticker” the face of their opponent with a funny nose, crazy hair, oversized glasses or a silly hat.

It’s a unique and hillarious way to compete in a quiz game, and first appeared in two titles by Lightwood Games, which were designed for educational use: Number Battle and Vocab Battle.

However, statistics showed that a large number of users downloaded the game and quickly gave up because they couldn’t play immediately. The two-player format required them to either have a friend nearby (with their own iPhone), or to find an opponent online at the same time.

Accordingly, a new game was developed which better addressed the demands of casual mobile gamers.

Rather than requiring an opponent to be available whenever you want to play, Face Rivals uses a turn-based format, allowing each player to answer a round of questions in their own time, and then be notified after their opponent has taken their turn.

The Appwardly Mobile Framework is used to handle communication between players – including in-game chat, as well as the game turns themselves. Special attention was paid to keeping the amount of data sent over the network to an absolute minimum to ensure a fast user experience: each photograph is downloaded to a device only once, with the app then using geometric functions to transmit and apply stickers using only tiny chunks of data.

While Face Rivals retains the math and vocab questions from its predecessors, it also includes thousands of trivia questions. As more questions are added to the game, the Appwardly Mobile Framework allows them to be delivered immediately over-the-air, without requiring an update in the App Store.

Face Rivals is a free app, available now on the App Store.