Introducing the new Scrabulous: Wordscraper

Johnny Sharp
guardian.co.uk, Monday September 29 2008 00.01 BST
The Guardian, Monday September 29 2008

'My life is a blank!" I identified with that comment from an American blogger when Scrabulous, the online facsimile of Scrabble, finally disappeared from Facebook last month. It was withdrawn by the Indian Agarwalla brothers, who designed the game, after legal threats from Scrabble's UK copyright owner, Mattel.

I only played the board game at Christmas with my Auntie Marion, but Scrabulous was something else. Among its charms was the facility to check for obscure words before you played them. So if anyone questioned the validity of "qi" (a Taoist term meaning "life force"), they would look foolish. Life without it was tough. At work, I resorted to long-neglected activities such as answering my phone, and that hour usually spent letter-juggling before bed proved difficult to fill.

But now the Agarwallas have returned, with Wordscraper. It's basically the same game, but with just enough differences - round letter squares, different bonus squares, and quadruple letter scores. You can also customise the board and rules. Already, many former Scrabulites have taken to Wordscraper like a Z to a quadruple letter score. But there is a split in the word-mangling community. Not before time, an official online Scrabble application has appeared on Facebook, and it already has half a million users. However, the average review rating of 1.6 out of five suggests few have formed a habit. "Very slow and clumsy," they say. "Yuk! Nasty graphics." "Ill thought out." Worse still, your turns are timed, meaning if your opponent plays a word while you're in a meeting, you forfeit your turn - thus alienating the desk-dwelling demographic at a stroke.

Wordscraper has no such restriction, and is rated 4.3 out of five. With little publicity, it already has 247,000 users. It'll surely send white-collar productivity plummeting by Christmas, to add to the economy's woes, but who cares? By then, I'll be so white hot that when I next play Auntie Marion at Scrabble, I'll thrash her within an inch of her qi.