The Agarwalla brothers have brought Scrabulous back to FaceBook…sort of. After being sued for copyright infringement for making their tile-and-letter game a little too close to the popular board game Scrabble, Facebook blocked off access to the game for U.S. and Canadian users. But if Hasbro has planned to capitalize on Scrabulous’s absence to promote its own licensed version of Scrabble (developed by EA), their excitement may be short lived. Scrabulous is back…except now it’s called Wordscraper, uses round circles instead of square tiles, and offers a few new twists to the game rules.
WIll the changes be enough to stave off Hasbro’s copyright lawyers? Only time will tell.
Scrabulous was easily one of the most popular applications on the Facebook social networking site, garnering some half a million users every day. Wordscraper will no doubt attempt to leverage the Scrabulous legacy—and all the free publicity surrounding the Hasbro suit—to push Wordscraper to similar heights.
Wordscraper enables players to design their own boards, putting bonus multipliers (even quintuple word scores) at arbitrary locations around the board. Although the game play still bears a striking resemblance to Scrabble, the overall look and feel is substantially changed: the Agarwallas pretty obviously knew Scrabulous’s days were numbered and had an alternative ready to go as soon as Scrabulous went down.
