Category: Technology Author : Steven Hodson Posted: February 8, 2009
Tags : Facebook, Hasbro, Lexulous, scrabulous
I’m pretty sure that anyone who is a Facebook member; or follows news to do with the service, will remember when Scabulous – a Scrabble knock-off – was all the rage on Facebook. It was so popular that it was even reviving interest in the real world version of the board game but that didn’t stop the game’s owner, Hasbro, from getting its panties in a bunch.
Even though Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla, the team behind Scrabulous, tried to work with Hasbro it ended up being a dead horse that just couldn’t be flogged anymore. Hasbro in the end succeeded in getting the game shut down much to the dismay of Facebook fans of the game.
Well it turns out that Rajat and Jayant may have the last laugh as they have returned to Facebook with a new game called Lexulous and really you can be forgiven if you happen to mistake it for the game that Hasbro had shut down. After all Lexulous is a word board game like Scabulous/Scrabble but the main difference lies in the board layout and the scoring.
So all you ex-Scrabulous fan it’s time to head on over to Facebook and get your word game on – not to mention give good old Hasbro the finger while you’re at it.
[hat tip and graphic courtesy of The Broad Brush]
Feb 8, 2009
Lexulous, with 8 letters and not 7, and a different board layout is most definitely not Scrabble. It might be as good as Scrabble or amazing in its own right, but anyone looking to play Scrabble has had to, sadly, give in and Play the crappy official Scrabble game online. No, it doesn't email you when a turn has been made, no you can't rearrange tiles manually, etc., but it is Scrabble and Hasbro has managed to remain the sole owner of online Scrabble.
Feb 8, 2009
I'm sure purists will stay loyal to Scrabble despite Hasbro and its antics. The point is Lexulous is a popular game that payed homage to Scrabble. Despite big corporations the authors reemerged with a more distinct product. That is most commendable after seeing dead bodies of other projects lying around (Freecraft anyone?)
Feb 8, 2009
This is just another application … Scrabulous was actually turned into Wordscraper (see here: http://apps.facebook.com/apps/application.php?i…) and it has almost 200,000 monthly active users. I believe the brothers are just looking to expand their already large word games empire
Mar 6, 2009
lets go