Rajat (left) and Jayant Agarwalla

The Brothers Agarwalla are putting the Scrabulous scrap behind them and finding fans by the lakh with their latest online word game, Wordscraper.

Once bitten, city-based Rajat, 27, and Jayant, 22, are anything but shy. While their Scrabulous was Scrabble played online, Wordscraper, launched in February on networking website Facebook, allows players to create different board layouts and rules. One can even customise the board to exactly match Scrabble.

The popularity of the game soared since the Agarwallas took Scrabulous off Facebook for users in the US and Canada last week following a suit by Hasbro, which holds the rights to Scrabble in the two countries. The 500 Wordscraper players a couple of weeks ago has increased to nearly 150,000. On Monday evening, there were 68,593 active users.

One of the new attractions is Wordscraper Blitz, which allows hundreds of players to compete with each other in real time for four-minute rounds. Whoever notches up the highest score before time runs out or tiles do is the winner. More than 600 players have been using Wordscraper Blitz during peak hours.

“We are very happy with the response Wordscraper has received. It had the highest activity level amongst all other applications on Facebook on Sunday. Right now we are working on a number of new features and user requests. Primarily, we shall improve the navigation and interface of the application,” Rajat told Metro on Monday evening.

He and his brother are working with lawyers to ensure that their latest game does not fall foul of copyright and trademark laws.

They are also chalking up a plan to cash in on Wordscraper’s popularity. Offers have been pouring in at the VIP Road office of their web development company, RJ Softwares. It was started by Rajat after he passed his Class XII. Like him, Jayant studied at St Xavier’s school and college, completing his B.Com in April.

The brothers from south Calcutta have found plenty of online support in their bid to beat the multi-national corporations at their own game.

The Wordscraper discussion forum is flooded with posts. "I think they have actually done a great job of making the game be like Scrabble without being a copy," wrote Eric Hochman in one of the posts.

“The brothers may have overstepped the line by making an online duplicate of Scrabble but I wish them all the best with Wordscraper, which is original,” said Payel Das, a city-based fan.