Dead "Scrabulous" Comes Back to Life with New Name, "Wordscraper"

Less than two days after the popular online version of Scrabble – Scrabulous was declared dead, came back to life late Wednesday!!! The Agarwalla Brothers who created Scrabulous have brought back wildly popular Scrabble knockoff on Facebook, but with a new name and a different look.

Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, who designed Scrabulous and launched it two years ago, voluntarily pulled their word game from Facebook on Tuesday after Hasbro that owns the rights to Scrabble in the United States and Canada filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit in New York against them, and also sent a takedown notice to the social networking site Facebook, urging it to abruptly remove the popular ad-supported Scrabulous application from its Website.

The Kolkata, India-based duo have now unveiled a new wordgame for Facebook, named Wordscraper, which bears remarkable resemblances to Hasbro’s Scrabble. In the new game, players compete to lay out words on a board, which looks like a big, blank Scrabble board, from a choice of seven letters at a time.

But, one genuine change is evident that the tiles are circular instead of square and players can fashion the rules as they please by adding special "double word" and "triple letter" tiles in any configuration.

Last week, Hasbro filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New York against Kolkata, India-based RJ Softwares, its CEO Rajat Agarwalla, and Jayant Agarwalla. In their copyright and trademark lawsuit, the game-making giant Hasbro claimed that the Agarwalla brothers have violated Hasbro's intellectual property rights by creating the online word game Scrabulous that uses the same colors as the classic Scrabble board, and resembles it in many other ways.

Hasbro, based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, urged the court to order Facebook to take down the Scrabulous game from its Website, disable the Scrabulous.com Website, and grant Hasbro damages and attorneys fees.

Designed by an unemployed architect Alfred Mosher Butts in the 1931, Scrabble is a board game of interlocking word building. In this game players form words from individual lettered tiles on a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid, scoring points based on the letters used, the length of the word and where the letters are placed.

The created words are formed across and down in crossword fashion and must appear in a standard dictionary.

The game is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions, and an estimated one hundred million Scrabble sets have been sold worldwide.

Launched in July, 2006, Scrabulous was an amazing word game that closely resembled the 60-year-old Scrabble word game. Before it was pulled from Facebook, Scrabulous was played by 450,000 people around the world every day. It was among the top 10 most downloaded applications on Facebook, the richly valued social-networking website that has more than 90 million active users.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people have begun installing the game within hours of Wordscraper’s launch on Wednesday night.