大象传媒

The Scrabulous puzzle

• Rory Cellan-Jones
• 28 Aug 08, 10:46 GMT

I promised the answers to the little Scrabble/Scrabulous puzzle I set earlier this week - and here it is. The six words were DELUDED, OBLOQUY, IDIOTIC, OPENING, UNHAPPY and CABBAGE, which I managed to fit on the board in the manner shown in the picture.

I reckon that adds up to a score of 162, plus 50 for getting all seven letters out first go, so 212. Someone called "dashing dave" was first to post the answers.

But most of you seemed more preoccupied with wading into an argument about ithe rights and wrongs of the affair. Some championed the right of the Agarwalla brothers - who created Scrabulous - to give Facebook users a better twist on Scrabble than its makers could provide. Others felt Mattel and Hasbro had a perfect right to battle to protect their intellectual property.

But in this war of words you seem to be voting with your feet, and that's bad news for the official Scrabble. The Agarwalla brothers have already launched a Facebook game called Wordscraper, which has a different board and circular tiles to get round the copyright problem. It has a quarter of a million users, as compared to the 71,000 now using the official worldwide version of Scrabble on Facebook - a figure which has actually fallen in the last few days.

And it looks as though more players, desperate for their fix, may be heading for the Scrabulous website and playing the game there. The result? Less traffic for Facebook - and the prospect of a new punch-up over intellectual property between the Agarwallas and Hasbro and Mattel. Now, who's got a seven-letter, high-scoring word for that?