| Headquarters | Kolkata, India |
|---|---|
| Key people | Rajat Agarwalla, Co-founder Jayant Agarwalla, Co-founder |
| Services | Online word game |
| Employees | 2 (January 2008) |
| Website | Wordscraper on Facebook |
| Type of site | Casual game |
| Registration | Required |
| Available in | English |
| Launched | 2008 |
| Current status | Active |
Wordscraper is a Scrabble-style word game available as a Facebook application. It was created by the Agarwalla brothers Rajat and Jayant, creators of Scrabulous, and differs from Scrabble by having no fixed board design or tile distribution, instead prompting the user to choose their own.
Although reported as being released in response a DMCA action against Scrabulous by Hasbro,[1] the game has been online since January 2008.[2]
Contents |
Wordscraper allows users to create a customised board and tile set of their choice. Users choose where premium squares are placed on the board. Premium squares range from 2x to 5x letter score and 2x to 5x word score. Users can also choose the tile distribution including quantity of each letter and score for each letter. Users are free to share the rules they have created with other players.
It is not possible to recreate the copyrighted Scrabble board layout using this process, or any rough approximation of the board - attempting to do so or to use a saved Scrabble-type layout results in a "Sorry, this board is not allowed" message or in the game being automatically changed to Wordscraper Standard. These restrictions were imposed as part of a legal settlement of a case brought by Hasbro concerning copyright of the Scrabble game.[3]
In addition to the ability to create customised games, Wordscraper differs from Scrabulous in a number of ways including:
As of 17 May 2010[update], Wordscraper has over 116,000 monthly active users.
Friends of people who play this game may receive notification that that person is playing the game, making users of the game inadvertent "advertisers" for the product.