Play the game

Washington, July 31: The Calcutta-based brothers behind the popular Facebook application Scrabulous have returned with a new word puzzle game.

It comes only two days after they took down their Scrabble-like application in the wake of a lawsuit filed against them by board-game maker Hasbro.

The free game had been one of the most popular applications on the social-networking site. Many fans who turned to it for a dose of procrastination each day griped loudly online when it disappeared. Hasbro had complained that Scrabulous infringed on its copyright.

The new game, Wordscraper, by Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, has a whiff of Scrabble to it and features many of the play options that made many Facebook users fans of the original Scrabulous. But the game has a different point system than Scrabble, uses circles instead of squares and has a few other differences.

Hasbro partnered with videogame publisher Electronic Arts on an official version of Scrabble for Facebook that it is hoping to get Scrabulous fans to use.

But on Tuesday, when Scrabulous was taken offline for Facebook users in the US and Canada, the “official” Scrabble game for Facebook was not working smoothly. Before it was shut down, Scrabulous had more than 500,000 users who were playing Scrabulous on a daily basis, according to its Facebook page.