Headquarters Kolkata, India Employees 2 (January 2008) Available in English language | Services Online word game Registration Required Type of site Casual game | |
Key people Rajat Agarwalla, Co-founder
Jayant Agarwalla, Co-founder Website Wordscraper on Facebook Similar Lexulous, Chicktionary, Words By Post, Hanging with Friends, Words with Friends | ||
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.
Contents
Wordscraper was reportedly released in response to a DMCA action against Scrabulous by Hasbro. It has been online since January 2008.
Game customisation
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.
Differences from Scrabulous
In addition to the ability to create customised games, Wordscraper differs from Scrabulous in a number of ways including:
User base
As of 17 May 2010, Wordscraper has over 116,000 monthly active users.