Scrabulous, the Scrabble-like game on Facebook, has been shut down in the US and Canada, but its creators, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, have returned with Wordscraper. This is a tile-based word game with a different appearance and a configurable board.
However, in a post on Facebook, Raphael Laderman (San Francisco, CA) says: "This link will start a game with a board which should be familiar to most people."
Meanwhile, after a sluggish start - which included some downtime - the official Scrabble game from Electronic Arts (who licensed Scrabble from Hasbro) appears to be booming - as of this evening, the application is showing more than 50,000 daily active users. We'll now wait and see if the gaming giant moves to shutdown Wordscraper as it did its predecessor. One would have to assume so, but kudos to the Agarwalla brothers for keeping a thorn in their side.
Scrabulous obviously has some popular support, but the days have gone when companies could simply release blatant rip-offs like the Defender and Snapper (ie Pac-Man) titles sold for the BBC Micro by Acornsoft -- without, as far as I can tell, the slightest peep from the BBC.
Update: Media Guardian has also covered the story.
