Inside Social Games

A day after Scrabulous developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla took the game offline in the US and Canada, the team of Indian brothers has relaunched the game with a new name and board design: Wordscraper. Wordscraper uses the same UI as the old Scrabulous and is played essentially the same way Scrabble is played, but with different “bonus tiles” and board dimensions.

Meanwhile, the official version of Facebook Scrabble, developed by EA under license from Hasbro, has experienced continued growth in the first day since Scrabble’s disappearance: usage has grown to nearly 60,000 daily active users. At its peak, Scrabulous drew over 700,000 daily active users.

We’ll track the growth of both games to see whether users will migrate to Wordscraper or the official version of Scrabble.

This morning, Vindu Goel at the NYT reported that Scrabulous, the popular Facebook game and Scrabble clone, had been shut down. Just last week, Hasbro, owner of Scrabble IP in North America, filed a DMCA claim against the makers of the game.

However, it appears that the take-down was not Facebook’s doing. Instead, it was a voluntary move by the Agarwalla Brothers (see interview here) while they sort out their legal matters in North America. Scrabulous remains accessible elsewhere in the world.

> Read more at Inside Facebook

For a young couple living in Chile and teaching English, playing Scramble together on Facebook became an outlet for their love of word games. Tyler Richardson and his fiancée Christine play so often that Tyler came up with a brilliant idea: to propose to her in a game.

With the help of Zynga, Tyler sent her on a secret agent scavenger hunt within a special Scramble game containing the words “Will You Marry Me.”  Her mission was to decode the message before time runs out and save the world.

“I had been trying to think of a creative way to engage for a while,” said Tyler, remembering his planning process. “We like spy movies, so I decided to send her on a scavenger hunt where she would be a secret agent. The Scramble folks were nice enough to fill in a board with a ‘marry me’ message and it became a mission to decode the secret message before time ran out and she was discovered.”

How did it work out?

“I think she really liked it, at least that is what she told me!  She said yes,” Tyler grins.

The couple, who met in college at UC Santa Barbara, will be finishing their teaching stint at a community college in Conception, Chile, before they tie the knot later this year.

I’m still waiting for Facebook developers to translate the iconic Candy Land from board game form to a Flash-intensive social romp. Even this jaded reviewer gets nostalgic for some games. Guess the Sketch Challenge is a “Pictionary” type game cleverly translated to the chat-heavy internet.

The cheery Flash interface explains the simple rules of the game: you are part of a large gaming room with ten or so other players. Each round, someone will draw an assigned object and you guess using the chat feature what that word is. You get more points the sooner you guess the word, and the game cleverly has a filter so that correct answers don’t show up in the chat- only wrong answers. This ensures that you can’t just wait till your friends say the correct word and take credit for it by repeating it.

If you’re good at drawing and a have a great vocabulary, you’ll love this game. The drawing feature is also a real breeze to use- you have a countdown timer and a full palette of colors and brush sizes to use. Black and white usually will do it, though. As the artist, you get the most points when other people guess your drawing quickly. If the word is too tough, you can always pass.

You can challenge friends, see your global rankings, and invite friends to receive bonus hints - giving you a distinct advantage in the game. This latter feature is a unique way to promote the game.

The synchronous elements here are some of the best I’ve seen - you can instantly jump into a new game with several other people and play. In my mind, it’s one of the best Facebook games out there that’s actually both challenging and fun. Guess the Sketch Challenge is an example of why board games work as social games. Bravo.

Gameplay: 8

Developers: 9

Sociality: 9

Hasbro and EA announced today that the two companies will soon launch an official version of Scrabble on Facebook. Interestingly, their press release makes no mention of Scrabulous, although it does mention “the current interest in Scrabble for social networking”.

So will the creators of Scrabulous (the Agarwalla brothers) be quaking in their boots that everyone will migrate away to the official game? Probably not. For one, there is already an official version of Scrabble on Facebook for users outside North America (licensed by Mattel, the owners of Scrabble outside of the US and Canada, and produced by RealNetworks). It currently has less than 6,000 daily active users, compared to Scrabulous with just over 450,000. This version has been out since late March and has shown little growth since then.

> Read the full story at Inside Facebook