Just a few days after Facebook has had to remove access to Scrabulous for legal reason, it is now back under a new guise: WordScraper. Here’s what it says about itself:
Welcome to Wordscraper. It’s the only game on Facebook that allows you to play the game the way you want to! With Wordscraper you can build your own board and try out whacky combinations with special high value squares.
The game is turn based, so you need not be online for very long periods. Plus, we also give you the option to store a board layout. This saves time when you want to play new games with the same layout.
So give it a try, you will love it. Don’t follow rules, make them!
I don’t think it’s worth debating the point as to whether Hasbro did the right thing shutting them down. U.S. law seems to be on their side, and although it seems crazy from a marketing point of view, it’s their choice at the end of the day. It wasn’t actually clear whether Facebook took the game down themselves, hackers were responsible or the authors took it down themselves to launch this new game, but as it was only taken down for users in the US and Canada, I’m pretty sure the lawyers have had their way.
Still, we now have Wordscraper to play with, assuming Hasbro has been placated, now that it’s called something different and the tiles are round rather than square. The question as usual is, has Hasbro really gained from this action?
