Scrabulous returns to Facebook with a new name

London, Aug 1 : Less than two days after it was pulled from the social networking site Facebook, Indian developers of Scrabulous have launched a new version of the popular Scrabble-like game, and that too with a new name-Wordscraper.

Caught in a legal row with Hasbro, the toymaker, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada, the two Calcutta-based software developers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla decided to take Scrabulous down from the US version of Facebook on Tuesday.

They have now launched Wordscraper, a Facebook game in which players compete to display their vocabulary skills on a Scrabble-like board from a choice of seven letters at a time.

However, Wordscraper differs from Scrabble slightly: the tiles are circular rather than square, and players can create their own rules - for instance by shifting the location of "double word" and "triple letter" squares.

This would mean a player could set his own default set of rules and play the equivalent of Scrabble in every game.

Another difference between Scrabble and Wordscraper is that the latest version has the option to play with "quadruple word" squares.

However, until now the game and its rules were periodically inaccessible.

"This is an unfortunate event and not something we are very pleased about. We sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come," Times Online quoted Jayant Agarwalla, as saying at the time the application was removed from Facebook in the US.

On Friday, Hasbro announced that it was suing the Aggarwalla brothers for breach of copyright and trademark. But Facebook condemned the move by saying that it was "disappointed" that Hasbro had drawn it into the dispute over Scrabulous.

The site said that in the future it hoped similar disputes could be resolved in a manner that "doesn't discourage other developers from using the Facebook platform to test new ideas."

ANI