Facebook Ate My Scrabble

From the glut of applications to flood the Facebook market recently, Scrabulous has been — for me — one of the most fun.

The premise is simple: play Scrabble online and (preferably) win. It’s a classic formula. But of course, this isn’t really Scrabble™-Scrabble, it’s a popular word game in which each player is given a rack of seven letters of varying points value, and players take turns to build words on a grid in which certain squares give bonuses. See? Nothing like Scrabble™…

Right, as long as the Hasbro representative has clicked elsewhere, we can continue.

Scrabulous is a perfect fit for the Facebook platform. It’s simple but addictive; it allows several players at once; and the interface is highly intuitive. Unfortunately, it’s been plagued by instability problems pretty much since day one, and this has caused me more than a little consternation. Even today, as I was about to make a slick triple-word score move, I encountered the ubiquitous error screen yet again.

The good news is that it seems to have overcome many of the long-term outages that were common as recent as a couple of weeks ago, and the developers seem genuinely committed to making things work. So if you’re into words, or if you just want a marginally educational way to while away your lunch hour at work, I’d heartily recommend Scrabulous. But get in quick before it goes down again:

Tags: application, Facebook, Scrabble