I wrote before about Scrabulous being dead and reborn. It ended up being mostly dead. Hasbro at their lunch and put them down, or so the world thought.

Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla are back in the game, more exactly, back in the word game business. They’ve brought us the new game, Lexulous.

Lexulous is a tile based game, much like Scrabulous was. Scoring is still based on tile values and positional bonuses. Play proceeds pretty much the same as well, with turns between the players.

So what’s different? Honestly it’s about the values. The game board is a different layout than the original style. Additionally the squares offer different bonus levels that before. To add another change, the tiles also have different values than before.

All in all these changes result in a different game, but one that reminds you at every turn of classic Scrabble. Heck, here’s the board.

So there you have it, Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla have brought us back a classic word game with a different face. They’ve hopefully done enough with changing up features, and adding some Facebook friendly play enablers that the fans will come back.

Cheers to you brothers Agarwalla!

It’s alive! It’s alive. Scrabulous closed its doors to North American players not even 48 hours ago. This brought to a seeming end the fun of tens of thousands of players.

Today a new application has appeared in place of Scrabulous; it’s called Wordscraper.

Look familiar? It should be.

The folks at Scrabulous have resurrected the game with a new name, but with some new play options. This isn’t your same old Scrabble game.

Players design their own board layout, placing letter and word multiplier tiles. Tiles can be tagged individually with either a word or letter multiplier with ranges from 2x to 5x. The play is still turn based, and scoring is done the same. Players even get seven tiles per round.

It will be interesting to see if folks will dive right back into the game or not. To make it easier, the Scrabulous application was automatically replaced by Wordscraper. It appears that active games may have been kept as well.

Bonus feature? Once you design a board layout, you can load that for future games. Check out this link to see my creation to a classic Scrabble layout.

Will you join me for a game?

Love Scrabble? Use Facebook? Then you were probably among the hundreds of thousands of players of Scrabulous. Scrabulous was the game of Scrabble online.

Scrabulous was well liked not only for being a fun take on a well known word game, but for it’s interface. Stripped of any pretense of wood and plastic, play was fast and easy. Without fancy graphics or spinning pixels, players could concentrate on the words.

It’s gone now. Gone that is for those in the US and Canada. The rest of the world can still play. For the rest though, they now have the ‘official’ Scrabble game on Facebook.

Yes. The game company Hasbro has brought out yet another version of Scrabble to enjoy. This one has more bells and whistles. Sound effects and spinning pixels are there to spare.

According to the message above, Hasbro is looking at making some of those things optional. This will probably affect the number of folks that become regular players. But will that and speedier play be enough to move the masses that played on Scrabulous?

Will you take up playing Scrabble on Facebook? Will you find solace in other word games? What features will drag you in?

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Bloggers have shown Scrabulous quite a bit of love. Will they continue to do the same with Scrabble? Or will they put down some harsh words?

Are you a Facebook application freak? Have dozens installed?  Or are you the more serious type that feels all applications are a distraction; that you don’t have time for Scrabulous or ChessPro.  Perhaps you’re somewhere in the middle, using Six Degrees, and FriendFeed applications.

Whatever your situation with Facebook, you are sure to have your most enjoyed, most hated, or most useful application.  I’d like to talk about those with you here on the blog.

Anyone can report a new application, but I’d love to get you involved talking about them.  In that spirit, what’s your favorite, most hated, most fun, most useful application, why and would you like me to write about it?

Come on; I know you have one.

(Comments welcome here; DMs on Twitter as well, @tojosan; also email – tojosan on gmail.com)

First there was Scrabulous, more recently Packrat, and now? FriendsForSale. You read the right, Friends For Sale.  Go figure that would be popular.  What it amounts to is you can ‘purchase’ your friends for game dollars.

Each of your friends that’s never been purchased starts out at the same price. As a person’s persona is purchased, the value goes up.  The increments are fairly small at first, but quickly escalate.

Purchasing a person is not a straight buy either.  There is a markup factor as well as profit for the current owner.  Also, the person being purchased receives a little bit of game cash.  This results in those being purchased frequently acquiring a good bit more cash than those that receive few or no purchases. Purchases can be made of unowned personas as well as those owned by others.

Basic play aside there are a couple of camps of folks involved in this game.  Those that see it as demeaning, and those that just see it as fun.  The demeaning side can be seen in how a person is bought and sold, as some would say, like a piece of garbage sale junk.  Even others in that camp just see the game as another way to feed on the cliques and elitism they see happening in social networks and social media across the board.

On the flip side, those just in it for the fun do have a few interesting takes on it.  Some treat it like a trading card game, with each trade being more like stealing away someones best rookie card.  Some take the fun into more risque things, playing up on the innuendo of ‘owning’ someone. And of course there’s the crowd that just finds it another cute game to play with friends.

The truth, in my opinion, is that neither side is all the way wrong.  Elitism is hard at play in this game in a way, but more of elitist worship.  It’s the groupie effect.  Persons like Robert Scoble and Jeff Pulver bring the most cash for purchase.  Yet ostensibly, neither plays the game themselves.  But because of hero worship, the one who owns becomes envied.  Now is this all bad? Not really, it’s definitely a parallel to collecting trading cards.

Trading cards have value based on how famous the player on the card is, and how hard the card is to get a copy of, and finally, what sentimental value there is. Friends For Sale’s economy behaves the same way essentially, with social media rockstars being generally the most valued cards as it were.  However, like in trading card collection, there are a wealth of those collecting their personal friends over the rockstars.

Unlike in collecting trading cards though, there’s one big difference.  Any player can buy your cards right out from under you in FriendsForSale.  All they need is enough game dollars.  This can make the game frustrating to participate in, especially when you play with your friends.

My thoughts on it? If you have time to play more games, this one is a low involvement game, with no clear winners or losers, and the game bucks are free every 4 hours.  There are definitely worse games and applications on Facebook.

If you don’t have time for more Facebook games, why the heck did you read this far?

Go, buy your friends, and steal my cards. I dare you!

ChessPro is the newest Facebook application from the guys that brought us Scrabulous.

Here’s a quick screenshot before I head into some details.

The pieces are immediately recognizable on the default board. Classic choices here for black and white pieces.  Above the game is show the game number, and the opening name.  This feature alone makes this version of online chess a notch above.

Over to the right is the menu, allowing viewing of all open games, statistics, and more.  From words to pictograms though as you move down.  The next menu row is of symbols. Those of you who play Scrabulous will be some what at home with those.

The buttons from left to right are:

Settings, Capture Pieces, Move History, Refresh Board, Move List, Delete/Resign, Help

Below the buttons is the player names, and rankings.  The rankings are based solely on games played with ChessPro.

Next down is the shown the last move.  The notation choice here is standard alpha numeric. This will allow for easier use across languages and skill levels.

Underneath the message box area are three colored dots.  One is refresh, one flips the board, and the last shows captured pieces.

One additional feature here, not present in Scrabulous, is the private notes area.  This area is only visible to you as a player.  The probable intended use is for annotating your games.  Notes are free form.

Several people already show up as users. Some friends and I have started a few games

My initial thought is that this will likely become my home for chess on Facebook.  The game play seems bug free, and the game appears to be built on the same framework as Scrabulous.  I expected it will scale well with much use.

I already have feature requests too:

- allow me to export completed games – at least the moves

- allow handicapping

- allow game snapshots to be posted to the news feed – or at least share the game in the stream

Looks good though. And you can find me playing there.