Sowpods Scrabble Tips

Scrabulous is back on Facebook, with a new name, new rules and circular tiles that could help its makers skirt legal claims from the owners of Scrabble. Two days ago the creators of Scrabulous blocked their popular version of the word game from U.S. and Canadian users of Facebook. The Indian brothers behind Scrabulous were sued in federal court by Hasbro Inc., the owner of Scrabble's North American rights. Now, the game has reappeared with the name Wordscraper. The change could help it avoid any brand confusion with Scrabble, a key point in trademark disputes. The game itself has also changed. Instead of Scrabble-like square tiles, for instance, Wordscraper has circles. The tiles earning double and triple points have been rearranged, and tiles for quadruple points have been added. Source: Yahoo News

Well Scrabulous is still alive, although apparently the Internet Scrabble Club is also under threat now. Can't Hasbro and Mattel (the international owners of Scrabble) see that Scrabulous and ISC are actually creating more fans of the game? It would be interesting to know if sales of the game have been affected since the rise of Scrabulous. As Josh Quittner of Fortune suggests: "If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win! If I were compassionate, I’d even cut in the guys who did all the work for a percentage point or two to keep the site running." And now you really can join a Facebook group to save Scrabulous!

Hasbro, the manufacturers of Scrabble, are trying to shut down Scrabulous - the ninth most popular Facebook application. Invented by two brothers from Calcutta - Jayant, 21 and Rajat Agarwalla, 26, the application has 2.3 million active users as of today and 70 million pageviews in the past month. However Hasbro have warned Facebook of their intention to shut down Scrabulous. So perhaps we do need a Facebook Group to Save Scrabulous ! Watch this space. If the worst comes to the worst we'll just have to continue playing live at http://www.isc.ro