Social Game Reviews

I am a word nerd. I love vocabulary, and the manipulation of letters to form meaning. This being the case, Scrabble is my favorite game of all time from the feel of the tiles between my fingers to the challenges I issue to friends that their word is completely invalid and requiring perusal of Webster’s Dictionary.

When Scrabulous appeared on Facebook in 2007, I was ecstatic. I lost hours upon hours in heated competition with my social network, trading barbs in the chatroom and taxing my cranium to find the perfect combination that would not only showcase my vocabulary but would boost my points into the win column. Milton Bradley’s lawsuit brought Scrabulous to a screeching halt and its replacement, Wordscraper, was just not the same.

Then came Scrabble. Still in beta, the Scrabble application is beautifully designed and brings the feel of the Scrabble board to the Facebook interface. While it is fun to play, Scrabble’s shortcomings cause it to lag behind the brilliant simplicity of the Scrabulous application.

Starting with the setup, as seen at left, the design is brilliantly executed right down to the wood grain on the virtual Scrabble tiles. However, to the novice Facebook player, the setup screen has a few hiccups in usability. First, when adding players to the game, the application on occasion fails to properly include the individuals selected. I’ve had to start over more than once when trying to add more than one person to a game.

Second, I have added question mark boxes to illustrate how certain settings are greyed out, seemingly for no reason. Why can’t I choose a speed? What is the difference between the dictionaries? Are these options only for use in selecting opponents randomly?

The setup screen would be well served by including clickable question marks next to each setting, allowing players who feel confused to find out what each setting is, and how they impact the game experience. Do they all have to be set for the game to work? Some may be unsure, and additional help should be provided. I’ve received several questions from less technically adept Facebook contacts, asking how to configure their games properly. Scrabble should help more with that. It should be noted, however, that games  using only the defaults work quite well and this is what I generally select and enjoy.

The game play itself offers a far more usable interface, with a chat room, a music toggle, a help icon and the ability to see your games and compare your stats to those of your friends and to Facebook users as a whole. Players can play a move on one game, then proceed directly to the next game on which it is their turn.

I’ve made a few notations on this screencap, pointing out the built-in dictionary (which I find very useful) as well as the listing of previous moves made by the game’s players. These two strategic tools are a boon to the game play, and very easy to use.

Scrabble offers seamless play and a very Scrabble-esque experience. However, the algorithm used to generate each user’s rack is either boon or bust, providing many vowels/consonants or none at all. I’ve talked to several of the friends I play the game with, and they concur that it is more common in this incarnation than it was in Scrabulous or is when playing on a tangible Scrabble board. They find their rack either contains too many vowels or not enough, and that vowels seem to be “loaded” toward the beginning of the game moreso than toward the end. This could be coincidence, but I’d like to hear your experiences as well. Do you find this to be the case?

My favorite part of the Scrabble beta is how easy the developers have made it to find friends who play also. Additionally, they’ve made it easy to compare how you rank to others on Facebook. In social gaming, this is critical to foster motivation and the player’s sense of accomplishment. I don’t know about  you, but I always want to know where I rank. If I find I am performing at lower levels than I’d like, I think harder about my tiles, and consult the dictionary more frequently to bring my status up to where I’d like it to be. The Scrabble developers did a great job with this aspect of the game, and it adds a lot to my enjoyment of it.

In conclusion, while Scrabble lacks the simplicity and straight-forward ease of its predecessor, Scrabulous, it is an enjoyable game, and would be well suited to lovers of language and competition alike. As the title notes, “it’s OK.” Not fantastic, but OK and does the job it set out to do.