Wordscraper is the new Scrabulous

Today, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla resurrected their recently murdered Scrabulous app under a new name, Wordscraper. This incarnation works much like the original, with a few significant differences:

1. You can create your own board layout (this includes layouts based on the original Scrabble board), or you can generate a random one.
2. You can share your boards with others.
3. The board uses circles instead of squares.
4. You can add “premium” circles that quadruple or pentuple your words and letters.

In short, it’s Scrabble on steroids. Not shying from an unfortunate situation, the Agarwalla brothers used their technical prowess to create a game that’s even more fun and robust than the original.

They made lemonade out of lemons. What every designer must do.

I’m no lawyer, but I suspect it’ll be harder for Hasbro and Mattel to claim copyright infringement against Wordscraper.

A related aside:

A couple of weeks ago, Electronic Arts sent me a private invitation to check out the official Scrabble Facebook app. I’ve been addicted to Scrabulous, but I got curious.

After some installation snafus, I finally got the beta working.

I had hoped Scrabble would compare well to Scrabulous. I was wrong.

The official Scrabble app is cumbersome, overly designed, and hard to play. Here’s a quick summary of what I don’t like:

1. The loading time is wretched, even with the distracting animation.
2. The visual design focuses more on the Scrabble branding than making the board easy to read and use.
3. The Flash animations don’t add anything to the game.
4. You can’t use the keyboard to lay your tiles.
5. No obvious way to “host” public tables and have others join.

If Hasbro/Mattel/Electronic Arts wants to appease the fans of Scrabulous, they should either buy them out and rerelease it.

Or, they should create a better version of online Scrabble. Unfortunately, the Agarwallas have already done that. Twice.