Killing time: Scrabulous at mrshl

Killing time: Scrabulous

August 27th, 2007 by mrshl

I can’t stop playing Scrabulous on Facebook. I’ve never really played scrabble before discovering this online version a couple of weeks ago. We have a retro version we bought at Target and we still haven’t opened it; it’s still in the plastic wrapper. But the Scrabulous Facebook app has been sucking huge amounts of my time.

Scrabulous

Of course, Scrabble has been available as a Web game in some form or another for a long time. The Yahoo! Games version has always been pretty popular. Also, Scrabulous.com runs essentially the same game on its own Web site. So, what are the advantages of Scrabulous on Facebook?

Well, first, you can invite your Facebook friends to play Scrabulous, and they don’t have to register at Scrabulous.com. And unlike the Yahoo! Games version, Scrabulous works in Firefox. You can play with up to four Facebook friends, and you can play multiple games at once. This comes in handy because games can happen over the course of days and weeks, whenever your pals happen to check in. If you want a faster game, you can join a game already in progress and meet some Facebook peeps you don’t already know. Finally, as you play, your stats are updated on your Facebook profile. If you’re as terrible at Scrabulous as I am, you might not be so enthusiastic about your stats being broadcast. But this feature can be disabled.

Scrabulous Stats

Other features of the game should be familiar to Scrabble players. You can play a regular game with a built in word-referee, or a “Challenge” game, in which players are responsible for policing their own games. There’s also an in-game chat function and a built-in search dictionary that can verify whether a word is “valid.”

Bottom line: if you’re on Facebook, and you dig Scrabble, I’d recommend you add this to your list of guilt-inducing time wasters.