Online Scrabble players rejoice!

Hasbro has dropped a lawsuit it had filed against the Indian brothers who had created a similar game, called "Scrabulous," which enjoyed huge success on Facebook until it was removed this summer.

The brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, from Calcutta, India, created the game because they couldn't find an online version of Scrabble that they liked. When Hasbro first filed suit this summer, Scrabulous was removed from Facebook and replaced with a Hasbro-sanctioned version of online Scrabble.

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Was it as good as Scrabulous? In a word, no. In fact, as a Scrabulous player myself, I have to wonder how many points I'd get for this word: "Sucked."

There were too many bugs in the new version. You'd take your turn, and the application would never acknowledge it, preventing the game from moving forward. Entire games were lost. Eventually, people stopped playing.



Critics also wondered why Hasbro, which owns the North American rights to the popular word-choice game, would pull such a boneheaded PR move. It came off as small-minded, especially for a company with board game products in every American household already.

The company had no word as to why the lawsuit was dropped.

Will Scrabulous return to Facebook? Unfortunately, the brothers Agarwalla agreed not to use the term "Scrabulous" after the lawsuit was filed. A game it created soon thereafter, "Wordscraper," has never gained the popularity of Scrabulous. Still, fans are ever hopeful, and the 48,000 members of the Scrabulous fan club on Facebook are wondering when they can pull out their dictionaries again.