Wordscraper: The Scrabulous Knock-off

The Scrabble-Scrabulous saga continues and it looks as though Scrabulous-duo Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla are still trying to get one up on Hasbro. With Scrabulous removed from Facebook another of the pairs’ games has been gaining popularity.

Wordscraper is essentially Scrabble (or Scrabulous) with a do it yourself feature for the board. Instead of using the traditional Scrabble board, users are invited to create their own version of the board, which they can then save and use again later. Basically you can add as many double, triple or quadruple letter score tiles on the board as you like. So what’s to stop you creating a board identical to a Scrabble board, saving it and using it for ever single game you play from then on? Apparently, nothing.

Scrabulous developers have been locked in a legal battle with Hasbro, the company that holds the copyright to Scrabble in the USA and Canada since the beginning of the year, however it was only this week that the game was removed from Facebook and is no longer accessible to anyone living inside Hasbro’s jurisdiction. Players outside of the US and Canada can still play the game on Facebook and the game is still available to be played on Scrabulous.com.

We wonder how long Wordscraper will last before Hasbro picks another fight. The application boasts 3,569 users, which isn’t all that impressive considering it’s been around for a while (posts in its bugs section date back to February). However, while that figure doesn’t really compare to the roughly 75,000 people playing EA’s official version of Scrabble, Wordscraper’s 4.8 rating kicks Scrabble’s 1.2 stars to bits.

We’ve contacted Hasbro and asked them about the company’s position on Wordscraper and the Scrabulous website, but alas, no reply so far. We’ll update when we know more.