San Francisco — The demise of Scrabulous on Facebook may have been a sad event for many, but at least it was just a transitory one. Scrabble knock-off Scrabulous was reincarnated on Thursday as online game under a new name and with some minor tweaks “Wordscraper,” in a move that could help fend off a lawsuit by US game maker Hasbro.
The reincarnation came less than two days after the game’s creators blocked their version of the word game from U.S. and Canadian users of Facebook and just hours after hackers sabotaged a Hasbro-sanctioned online Scrabble game made by Electronic Arts.
Developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta were sued in federal court by Hasbro Inc., the owner of Scrabble’s North American rights, for copyright and trademark infringement.
Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble trademark in those territories, were threatening action, and have also launched an official Scrabble Facebook game.
Scrabulous.com was launched by Agarwalla brothers in India in 2005 and rose to popularity two years later after they released a version as a free “add-on” application for Facebook, the social networking site.
The Agarwalla brothers have now released “Wordscraper,” which is similar to Scrabulous but has certain differences. That could help it avoid confusion with Scrabble, a key point in trademark disputes.
The changes begin with minor cosmetic differences. The name, Wordscraper, no longer has an uncanny resemblance to the name of the board game that it mimics, which is the first step in fending off copyright lawyers. The board itself got a slight redesign too, so now all of the tiles are circular, making the board look more like a sheet of bubble wrap than a traditional Scrabble board.
The latest feature in Wordscraper is the ability to completely customize your board. Do you want an entire row of double word scores across the middle of the board? Go ahead. There are even new score tiles included by the addition of 4x and 5x word and letter score tiles, so you can create some pretty crazy high score board layouts. And once you have created a board layout you can save it for later so you can keep playing games with one of your more eccentric Wordscraper boards.
In theory, if a player decided that the version he or she liked best was one where the configuration of squares was identical to that on a Scrabble board, they could set that as their default set of rules and play the equivalent of Scrabble in every game.
There also appear to be other quirks which distance the game from Scrabble such as the option to play with “quadruple word” squares, though the game and its rules were periodically inaccessible today.
At the time the application was removed from Facebook in the US, Jayant Agarwalla said: “This is an unfortunate event and not something we are very pleased about. We sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come.”
Scrabulous, which was until recently played by 450,000 people around the world every day, still appears to be available to Facebook users outside the US, though it is reported to have suffered some down time in the last day or so.
Now, whether those design changes will protect the creators from copyright infringement remains to be seen. The case could turn on whether Wordscraper feels more like Scrabble or a generic word game.
Hasbro said in a release that it is monitoring developments and will take action “as appropriate.”
Word of renewed Wordscraper spread quickly online and more than 3,500 people were reportedly playing the online game on Facebook by midday Thursday in California.
More than 500,000 people reportedly played Scrabulous daily on Facebook.
Hasbro sued Scrabulous in federal court in New York State a week after Electronic Arts released, with Hasbro’s blessing, a free online Scrabble game customized for Facebook websites in the United States and Canada.
It is unclear whether the removal of Scrabulous from the US Facebook site will mean for non-US users of Scrabulous. Outside the US, the rights to Scrabble are owned by Mattel, owner of the Barbie toys, which has in the past said it will “actively protect” its brands and trademarks.
The long-running dispute between Hasbro and the Agarwalla brothers came to a head on Friday, when Hasbro announced it was suing the developers for breach of copyright and trademark.
In a statement earlier this week, Facebook — which has not created the game but merely provides the platform on which it is played — said that it was “disappointed” that Hasbro had drawn it into the dispute over Scrabulous.
The site, which is used by 80 million people worldwide, said that in the future it hoped similar disputes could be resolved in a manner that “does not discourage other developers from using the Facebook platform to test new ideas.”
According to the Wordscraper main page on Facebook, the game is not finished yet, and more features will be coming in the future. The Agarwalla brothers have really outdone themselves this time, creating a game that trumps their already addicting Scrabulous game by introducing a completely customizable board to ensure that each game will be a fresh experience. It is only a matter of time before Wordscraper reaches the popularity level of its predecessor, and with the new features it is sure even to exceed that.