Keeping Score Against Scrabble
By Josh Quittner
The Scrabble rebellion rages on! After forcing the shutdown on Facebook of a popular Scrabble knockoff called Scrabulous, Hasbro promoted its own online version. Fans of Scrabulous, which had 500,000 daily users, went wild--and not in a good way. A "Save Scrabulous" group now has more than 50,000 members. Other protest groups include "Give Us Scrabulous or Give Us Death!" and "Please God, I Have So Little: Don't Take Scrabulous Too."
Game over? Not quite: Scrabulous' founding brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, just launched Wordscraper, a build-your-own game that, coincidentally, uses a grid the same size as Scrabble's. If a Facebook player happens to make a board that's identical to Scrabble's--a feat that takes less than two minutes--well, it's a free world. Hasbro officials did not comment on the new application.