There was a bit of hoo haa over the week with Scrabulous - the fantastic add on for Facebook which I’ve purposely not talked about until recently.
Scrabulous is a version of Scrabble which started life as a supported website, but recently migrated onto Facebook. I use the word “version”, truth is that it’s an exact copy.
Anyway, Hasbro have decided that - seen as Facebook is stupidly loaded at the moment - they want to sue them until they shut it down. Now, I’m not going to get into the legal side of things. Yes it’s illegal but Hasbro could - from a business sense - could make a little bit of money from it. But if it does shut down it would be a shame.
You see, the only national tournament I ever played in was a school’s Scrabble Tournament.
It was around 1996-1997. Myself, regular commenter Sibz and a few other people (think there was 6 of us, all men) had a little scrabble Round Robin’ tournament to find the 2 best Scrabblers to play in a tournament in the Wirral. I finished third, but the person who finished second dropped out.
My partner was brilliant, one of those brilliant scrabble players you come across time to time. He was the Pele of scrabble, I wasn’t. Furthermore, I was also a hormonal teenager, and - somewhere in my mind - I let two girls beat me in the first round in the tournament in the hope of pulling either (or hopefully both) of them. It didn’t happen, I lost, and a final loss in my final game sent us out.
We were joint third with 3 wins (all my partner), if I had won one more game we’d have gone through. What I didn’t realise at the time was that the Young Telegraph were covering the story for their paper, and - in no uncertain terms - said I was rubbish.
I still don’t buy the Daily Telegraph to this day.
Anyway, whilst Srabulous is still up and I’m still loving it, I’d like to throw open a open challenge in a reclusive style play online to greatness not shared since the days of the late Bobby Fischer (except without the anti-semitism). My facebook profile is up on the left, why not challenge me to a game of Scrabulous?
Picture: Scrabble Board by Michael (used under Creative Commons)
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Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay.
I really hope they don’t take it off of Facebook as it’s a lot of fun when you are killing time at work.
I would play you but I am soo shite it would be embarrassing
Did you see the original Scrabble image the BBC used on the Scrabulous article? It had the word “BUM” in it XD They took it down, the miserable gits.
“play in a tournament in the Wirral”
For some reason this bugs me lol. It’s on The Wirral or in Wirral.
Never in The Wirral. Something to do with it being The Wirral Peninsula and can you be in a peninsula? Who knows. Sorry to moan.
Scrabbles fab though =) and can this world be any more obsessed with suing people? Grr.
Have you ever seen the documentary about scrabble tournament players? It is pretty entertaining.