Monday, January 12, 2009

Scrabulous, is that you?

Know that feeling of running into an old friend on the street, and having him call out your name You see the face, but you don't recognize it immediately.  Then it hits you, friend!  But wait, some things have changed.  As you see one thing different him, you start to notice others...

This fits well with my relationship with Scrabulous.  You may remember that my first post here was mourning the loss of my good friend.  I moved on, made other friends, and now I find that Scrabulous has risen from the dead.  Zombie Scrabulous?  Enough with these ridiculous analogies, on to some content.

Apparently, about 3 months ago, Lexulous.com was born, and used the old Scrabulous data.  It was until 2009 when it was reborn on Facebook, and we got a message from Rajat and Jayant that they had returned.  I was amazed; all of my old games were still saved, and active.

I made my first move, and was filled with joy.  A few plays later, I noticed something strange.  The Z is worth 12 points???  As any serious Scrabble player can tell you, the Z is only worth 10 points.    Maybe this was just in the new game I started.  No, they went back and updated all of the tiles on the old games too.  Did they update the scores?  Maybe, but there's no way to really tell.  Here's a list of the updated tiles, with their Scrabble values in parentheses:1

B:4 (3)
C:4 (3)
F:5 (4)
H:5 (4)
K:6 (5)
M:4 (3)
P:4 (3)
Q: 12 (10)
T: 2 (1)
V: 5 (4)
W: 5 (4)
Y: 5 (4)
Z: 12 (10)

Sure, there's a different name2, and a slightly different scoring system, but will I still play the game?  Of course.  I can't turn my back on a game I love, even if it's a slightly deformed version of it.

Has anyone else noticed any other changes?  Also, challenge me to a game.

[1]: This is going off memory, so something might be wrong.  But don't tell me if it is, I don't want to feel ashamed.
[2]: Today we debated whether or not it's a good name.  I think it's fine (derived from lexicon, but still keeping the some resemblance to Scrabulous), but other people thought it sounded like ass (their words, not mine).  Your thoughts?

Godspeed.

5 comments:

  1. Oh wow, I didn't even notice that, good catch!

    I do know that you can still bingo with 7 tiles.

    ReplyDelete
  2. You're too awesome at Scrabble, Will. Challenging you is suicide.

    ReplyDelete