Scrabulous is an online version of the popular board game Scrabble. In Scrabulous players generally play with a ten minute time clock that ticks down while they are playing. There are also even shorter games with a quick five minute clock. Players can ask for more time in any game. Scrabulous automatically verifies words so their is no squabbling about whether or not a word is legitimate. The game keeps a player's stats including how many games they have won and lost and what their rating is. The popular viral game has 700,000 daily players and nearly three million registered users according to the New York Times.
Fans of the game are obsessive. They play against friends, co-workers, family members and strangers, and many have several games going at once.
Everyone seems to love the online game — everyone, that is, except the companies that own the rights to Scrabble: Hasbro, which sells it in North America, and Mattel, which markets it everywhere else.
In January, they denounced Scrabulous as piracy and threatened legal action against its creators, two brothers in Calcutta named Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla who run a software development company. Both Hasbro and Mattel said they were hoping for a solution that would not force them to shut down the game.
Scrabulous received a boost when a Facebook application was created for the game. The Times article says some eager players play multiple games at a time. The two brothers who created the game are making advertising revenues frm the game. Since it is based on the Scrabble board game it will be interesting to see what happens between the Agarwalla brothers and Hasbro and Mattel. Hopefully, they will come up with a smart solution that allows this amazingly popular game to continue.
