If the inventor of Scrabble were alive today, he would be amazed by the way millions of people are playing his word game now: on tiny screens, wherever they happen to be, against players who can be halfway across the country, or the world.
Scrabble first proved that it did not need the actual click of tiles against a board when it became popular on computers around two decades ago. Now, the game has migrated to smartphones, both through the trademarked game and a similar game called Words With Friends.
In fact, Words With Friends, owned by Zynga, has stolen some of Scrabble s thunder with its digital-only word formation game. Ten million people have downloaded the iPhone app so far, Zynga says, and it went live on Android systems this month.
Solitaire Scrabble is an option on computer and phones, but many players prefer a human opponent. Both mobile Scrabble and Words With Friends allow social interaction through turn-based play and a chat feature. It feels like I m talking to my friends through the games I m playing with them, said Paul Bettner, who developed Words With Friends in 2009 along with his brother David.
Over the phone, games can take days or even weeks to play out, so people often have several games going at once. (Can you cheat? The answer is yes.)
To add more drama to a game that is prone to pauses, the Bettners increased the scores on some letters a C is four points instead of three, for example, and a J is 10 instead of 8.
They also pushed the double- and triple-count squares closer together so that big word scores were more likely. What ends up happening is you have these moments that are more explosive, Paul Bettner said. Incidentally, making the point values and board layout different from those of Scrabble avoids any legal trouble with Hasbro, which owns the American and Canadian rights to the game (Mattel owns the remainder).
The first time Stefan Fatsis, a competitive Scrabble player, tried Words With Friends, he said, he ended up with a score of 626. His highest score after thousands of games of Scrabble has been 603.
Mr. Fatsis, author of Word Freak, about the culture of Scrabble, said the mobile Scrabble game via Facebook was clunkier and more commercial than Words With Friends. Although Hasbro s digital strategy is improving, it has largely been playing catch-up in the digital realm, he said, taking longer than it should have to introduce new technology and iron out bugs in its games.
As a result, smaller and more nimble entrepreneurs have been able to come up with popular alternatives, he said.
Mark Blecher, senior vice president for digital media and gaming for Hasbro, denied that the company had been slow to embrace digital technology. Hasbro innovates, but we innovate when we know there s a real market, he said. Words With Friends, he added, is not a substitute for Scrabble; it lacks the true rules and the true pattern of the game.
Hasbro does not disclose data on mobile Scrabble users, who can access the game in several ways on their cellphones: through Facebook, through an iPhone app (Android coming soon) and through the site Pogo.com. Its digital games are developed by Electronic Arts.
Megan Lawless, 31, of Chicago, plays Scrabble and Words With Friends on her cellphone and said she liked them both as a way to connect with people close to her. She learned to play Scrabble from her great-grandmother, who belonged to a Scrabble league.
One day in 2009, no one she knew was available to play with her, so she hit the option on Words With Friends that allows play with a random opponent.
It was a very out-of-character thing for me to do, she said. But the game went well: she could tell that she and her opponent were evenly matched in terms of skill. Her opponent proposed a rematch, and repeated games led to chatting about their personal lives. Eventually, she found out that her opponent was a man, Jasper Jasperse, and that he was a firefighter who lived in Holland.
After they began e-mailing each other and talking on Skype, Mr. Jasperse asked if he could visit her in Chicago, and we clicked right away, Ms. Lawless said. Now, they plan to marry in July, and he will move to Chicago.
The random function did not work out as well for Alex Alan, 31, of Brooklyn. For a while, I was playing these anonymous people, seven or eight going on at once, and it was getting out of hand, he said. He was playing Words With Friends, he said, when he could have been talking to his girlfriend. So now he restricts his games to a small cadre of people he knows in real life.
In an effort to unplug, Mr. Alan also tries to play Scrabble with his friends on a real board, the kind that would be instantly recognized by Alfred Mosher Butts of New York, who invented Scrabble in the 1930s.
Indeed, the popularity of digital Scrabble has increased sales of the board game, Mr. Blecher of Hasbro said. The company sold four million Scrabble-branded games of the physical variety in 2010, an increase of more than 100 percent in a five-year period.
As Mr. Fatsis put it: The truth is, there is something really exciting about handling the tiles and putting them down on a board and having your opponent sit right across the table from you.
Scrabble first proved that it did not need the actual click of tiles against a board when it became popular on computers around two decades ago. Now, the game has migrated to smartphones, both through the trademarked game and a similar game called Words With Friends.
In fact, Words With Friends, owned by Zynga, has stolen some of Scrabble s thunder with its digital-only word formation game. Ten million people have downloaded the iPhone app so far, Zynga says, and it went live on Android systems this month.
Solitaire Scrabble is an option on computer and phones, but many players prefer a human opponent. Both mobile Scrabble and Words With Friends allow social interaction through turn-based play and a chat feature. It feels like I m talking to my friends through the games I m playing with them, said Paul Bettner, who developed Words With Friends in 2009 along with his brother David.
Over the phone, games can take days or even weeks to play out, so people often have several games going at once. (Can you cheat? The answer is yes.)
To add more drama to a game that is prone to pauses, the Bettners increased the scores on some letters a C is four points instead of three, for example, and a J is 10 instead of 8.
They also pushed the double- and triple-count squares closer together so that big word scores were more likely. What ends up happening is you have these moments that are more explosive, Paul Bettner said. Incidentally, making the point values and board layout different from those of Scrabble avoids any legal trouble with Hasbro, which owns the American and Canadian rights to the game (Mattel owns the remainder).
The first time Stefan Fatsis, a competitive Scrabble player, tried Words With Friends, he said, he ended up with a score of 626. His highest score after thousands of games of Scrabble has been 603.
Mr. Fatsis, author of Word Freak, about the culture of Scrabble, said the mobile Scrabble game via Facebook was clunkier and more commercial than Words With Friends. Although Hasbro s digital strategy is improving, it has largely been playing catch-up in the digital realm, he said, taking longer than it should have to introduce new technology and iron out bugs in its games.
As a result, smaller and more nimble entrepreneurs have been able to come up with popular alternatives, he said.
Mark Blecher, senior vice president for digital media and gaming for Hasbro, denied that the company had been slow to embrace digital technology. Hasbro innovates, but we innovate when we know there s a real market, he said. Words With Friends, he added, is not a substitute for Scrabble; it lacks the true rules and the true pattern of the game.
Hasbro does not disclose data on mobile Scrabble users, who can access the game in several ways on their cellphones: through Facebook, through an iPhone app (Android coming soon) and through the site Pogo.com. Its digital games are developed by Electronic Arts.
Megan Lawless, 31, of Chicago, plays Scrabble and Words With Friends on her cellphone and said she liked them both as a way to connect with people close to her. She learned to play Scrabble from her great-grandmother, who belonged to a Scrabble league.
One day in 2009, no one she knew was available to play with her, so she hit the option on Words With Friends that allows play with a random opponent.
It was a very out-of-character thing for me to do, she said. But the game went well: she could tell that she and her opponent were evenly matched in terms of skill. Her opponent proposed a rematch, and repeated games led to chatting about their personal lives. Eventually, she found out that her opponent was a man, Jasper Jasperse, and that he was a firefighter who lived in Holland.
After they began e-mailing each other and talking on Skype, Mr. Jasperse asked if he could visit her in Chicago, and we clicked right away, Ms. Lawless said. Now, they plan to marry in July, and he will move to Chicago.
The random function did not work out as well for Alex Alan, 31, of Brooklyn. For a while, I was playing these anonymous people, seven or eight going on at once, and it was getting out of hand, he said. He was playing Words With Friends, he said, when he could have been talking to his girlfriend. So now he restricts his games to a small cadre of people he knows in real life.
In an effort to unplug, Mr. Alan also tries to play Scrabble with his friends on a real board, the kind that would be instantly recognized by Alfred Mosher Butts of New York, who invented Scrabble in the 1930s.
Indeed, the popularity of digital Scrabble has increased sales of the board game, Mr. Blecher of Hasbro said. The company sold four million Scrabble-branded games of the physical variety in 2010, an increase of more than 100 percent in a five-year period.
As Mr. Fatsis put it: The truth is, there is something really exciting about handling the tiles and putting them down on a board and having your opponent sit right across the table from you.
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