I used to play a great game on Facebook, called Wordscraper... a take on the Scrabble idea, with the added ability to create your own custom boards.
Then Hasbro stepped in and bullied and shut down Wordscraper, and its "cousin", Lexulous. Oddly enough, they also released their own online version of Scrabble about the same time... and it was DREADFUL.
Wordscraper and Lexulous eventually returned... with a changed layout and several "tweaked" rules... but to a Scrabble player, scores are like trophies, and with fixed values (tile values, double/triple score squares, etc.) it's easy to compare crowns with other Scrabble aficionados.
But now there are 8 tiles to a rack instead of 7; most of the tile values have changed (Q and Z are 12 points instead of 10, etc.), there are 4x and 5x multipliers, and the new default layouts make it too easy to cross two word-multipliers at once, something that is (by design) very rare and difficult to do in Scrabble. In short, it really takes a lot of the challenge out of the game, as well as most of the meaning of the scores. And the ultimate insult: creating your own custom Scrabble-layout board is blocked.
In essence, Hasbro has used legal wrangling to strike down the competition. Nice.
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Re: Canuck weighing in here...
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Good points, hobo...
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Sounds all too familiar...
Then Hasbro stepped in and bullied and shut down Wordscraper, and its "cousin", Lexulous. Oddly enough, they also released their own online version of Scrabble about the same time... and it was DREADFUL.
Wordscraper and Lexulous eventually returned... with a changed layout and several "tweaked" rules... but to a Scrabble player, scores are like trophies, and with fixed values (tile values, double/triple score squares, etc.) it's easy to compare crowns with other Scrabble aficionados.
But now there are 8 tiles to a rack instead of 7; most of the tile values have changed (Q and Z are 12 points instead of 10, etc.), there are 4x and 5x multipliers, and the new default layouts make it too easy to cross two word-multipliers at once, something that is (by design) very rare and difficult to do in Scrabble. In short, it really takes a lot of the challenge out of the game, as well as most of the meaning of the scores. And the ultimate insult: creating your own custom Scrabble-layout board is blocked.
In essence, Hasbro has used legal wrangling to strike down the competition. Nice.
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