While I’ve had to spend the last few years dredging through the countless apps on facebook, being bitten by zombies and vampires and probably some Frankensteins, I really only used one app, the Multiplayer Trivia one. Even now I spend virtually no time on the site, so I don’t even play that anymore. Well for those of you who don’t know they had a really good Scrabble app called Scrabulous, and Hasbro thinking it wasn’t very fair to their copyright (and it wasn’t) got Facebook to kill the app.
Piqued by my interest in the new site design I logged back into the old ‘book and also tried the new *OFFICIAL* Scrabble app. It was terrible, sucked, no fun. Yes you play with friends, but you can’t play right away, you’re stuck with long-term matches, like playing chess by mail. And this in turn inspired me to try and find the missing Scrabulous. Which I did, at scrabulous.com, and it is really cool. You log into the website and jump into a lobby, which seem to always have plenty of players, and can get started quickly and easily.
There are a couple of notes for those who have only lived with the board game version. First off, all matches are automatically timed, if you run out of time you lose, which is fair considering it is an online game. Second they have two different dictionaries and they have numerous options when it comes to bogus words. Most of the early matches I’ve played used the easiest option where the dictionary automatically bumps bad words, no penalty minus wasted time. The others allow opponents to challenge with varying penalties, and it’s much easier than flipping thru a thick Scrabble dictionary. It is a fast, efficient version of the game. If those reinforced gameplay rules are a massive turn-off, then stick to the board game, otherwise I would say that scrabulous is so easy to get in and play it’s worth it for anyone who cares even a modicum for the Scrabble (c).
