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?

Facebook holds few attractions for some. But for others, it’s a replacement for Excite and Yahoo games. The bonus being your opponents are taken from your contacts. That aside, there are hundreds of games now available on Facebook.

Few games though are in the category of both challenging and of high replay value. zynga has taken a stab at bringing us some word games that meet both those criteria. Those games are Word Twist, Pathwords, and Scramble.

All three games present time based challenges where word construction is the key. In each case, minimum word length is always three characters. The tiles in each case are randomly arranged and your task is to discover all of the words.

Word Twist presents the player with six letters. The player types or clicks the letters to form words. Score is based on the number of words found, with a bonus for ‘bingo’ words. That’s words of six characters. Here’s a screenshot.

Word Twist allows the players to complete all of their turns without waiting. There is no direct competition between the players. The number of terms and time is set at game creation.

Pathwords presents an entirely different challenge. Where Word Twist gives the player six characters to work with, Pathwords gives a whole field. A picture will help explain.

The players selects the words by clicking on the initial letter of the word and then clicking on the rest of the letters. To enter a word, a double click is required on the last letter. An alternate method is clicking on the first letter and holding the mouse button. The player can then drag over the rest of the letters in the word. When the mouse button is released the word is entered. Wrong words do not score, and clear the letter selection.

Once a word is accepted, the letters in the word are removed from the board. Each column’s letters then slide down and new letters are added at the top. An added feature allows the player to scramble the letters on the board at a penalty of points.

Scramble is my favorite of the three games. Scramble plays like the home game, Boggle(tm). The players take turns finding words in the 4 by 4 array of letters. With the classic tile look, it feels a lot like Boggle.

Players alternate turns finding words. Score is based on word length. There are no bingos or such. Typical games are 5 rounds of 3 minutes each. A word hit feature exits that requires 2 credits each use. Credits are earned on the first visit to Scramble during a day.