After the demise of Scrabulous, Wordscraper and Scrabble duke it out on Facebook

A couple of months ago, Scrabulous was taken off of Facebook because of Hasbro. Realizing that Scrabulous had millions of users, Hasbro decided that Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, the game’s developers, must be shut down.

This created a huge outcry from the Facebook community to bring back Scrabulous. So Hasbro teamed up with Electronic Arts, shortly after Scrabulous was taken off-line, to make a Scrabble application and make it just as popular.

At the same time the Agarwalla brothers, refusing to give up, were developing a similar game to Scrabulous called Wordscraper , which now has almost a quarter of a million users. The look of the game is very similar, but the scoring is way different.

I played it a few times and found it to be a bit confusing. You can customize how you score in the game if you want or have the time to, but frankly I didn’t like it. I liked the simplicity of Scrabulous and I knew how to play the game without having to spend time learning the rules. The games that I started with my friends were abandoned and never finished.

Hasbro’s Scrabble Beta has a half a million users and is good but not great. Some people do not like the animations (which you can turn off) and there are a few bugs that they need to work out, such as sometimes a turn gets skipped without the player skipping their turn and looking like you only have six letters when you should have seven. To rectify the latter problem, just hit the shuffle button and voila! You have seven again.

Users on Facebook have rated Wordscraper 4.3 out of 5 and Scrabble Beta has been rated 1.6 out of 5. I think part of the ratings is due to big companies fucking with the little guy and I don’t blame them.

It’s too bad that something so fun and free to play had to get shut down, but the replacement games should fill that Scrabulous void in your life.