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!
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.
Craig Grannell
Contributor Related content
The 24 best Apple TV apps you’ll actually use
Apps on your telly? What larks! But you’ll still be using this selection when the novelty wears off
Best AirPods alternatives in 2025 reviewed and rated
AirPods, schmairpods, these are the best AirPods alternatives around
