Yesterday, one day after taking down Scrabuluos in the U.S. and Canada in response to a lawsuit from Hasbro, the Indian brothers behind Scrabulous, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, released a brand new crossword-like game on Facebook called Wordscraper. The brothers have obviously been preparing this countermove for a long time. Wordscraper is designed to get around any of the intellectual property claims Hasbro has made against Scrabulous, especially the trademark infringement claims. The name is not a rip-off of Scrabble, the board looks very different, and there are even some new twists to the rules.

The brothers have even foregone the familiar square tiles for circles. Quite frankly, I don’t like this. It hurts my eyes. (Call me a traditionalist). It all blends together and makes it hard to grok the board at a single glance.

The gameplay is much better. Wordscraper is like Scrabble with wild board tiles. You can create your own board by putting assigning different point values to each space where a player puts her letters. For instance, instead of a set pattern, you can move double-word or triple-letter score tiles around the board before you start playing, and you can go crazy and stick in quintuple-word scores. (Go easy on those).

When Scrabulous was taken down, it had half a million daily active users and Hasbro’s/Electronic Arts’ official Facebook Scrabble game had only about 15,000. Two days later, the official Scrabble beta is up to 63,000 daily active users. Wordscraper has 3,600 daily active users. Now the race is on. Where will the bulk of Scrabulous fans go?

Wordscraper has a good chance of unseating the official Scrabble. (In a TechCrunch poll with 2878 respondents, 66 percent think that Hasbro went too far with its lawsuit and will suffer a resulting consumer backlash). Just please, do something about those circles. They make me dizzy.

Long outplayed by two Indian brothers, Hasbro finally delivers a massive counter blow to Scrabulous, one of the most loved games on Facebook. Scrabulous fans in North America will see the following message when they try to play the game:

Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.

Hasbro has long contended that Scrabulous infringes on its trademarks for Scrabble. It licenses the North American digital rights for Scrabble to Electronic Arts, which announced its own Facebook version of the game earlier this month. (RealNetworks owns the international digital rights, and is not taking as aggressive a stance against Scrabulous).

Last week, Hasbro filed suit against the owners of Scrabulous, Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla. The same day, EA publicly launched its officially-sanctioned Scrabble game on Facebook. (See screen shot below, which I took that day).

Hasbro and EA planned their moves very methodically and waited patiently for their chance to strike. Perhaps EA felt that it could not compete with Scrabulous other than by taking it out at the knees. Scrabulous boasts 509,505 daily active users. EA’s Scrabble Beta has 14,956 (after only five days). Now, the question is whether Scrabulous fans will boycott the official version of Scrabble on Facebook or switch over to satisfy their word lust.

Update: EA’s Scrabble app seems to be down on Facebook. Maybe they weren’t ready for the surge in traffic.

Facebook now has vaporware. After a lot of huffing and puffing at the beginning of the year, Hasbro and Electronic Arts are finally getting ready to unveil their official version of Scrabble on Facebook. Today, they announced that the Facebook app EA has been working on for more than six months will be launched later this month, although a version on Pogo (EA’s online casual gaming site) is available today.

There is a Facebook Scrabble app in private beta (see screen shot at left), but the company is still testing it. It is not clear what is taking EA so long. After all, this is just a Facebook app, not a fully-featured video game like Spore.

It is also not clear what will happen to Scrabulous, the unofficial version of Scrabble that has become one of the most popular apps on Facebook. Scrabulous, which was developed by two brothers in India, was almost shut down earlier this year because Hasbro claims that it infringes on its trademarks. Scrabulous was in acquisition talks with many different companies, including Electronic Arts (which has the domestic license to digital versions of the game) and Real Networks (which has the international digital rights), but everyone balked on price.

Rather than force Facebook to shut down Scrabulous immediately, however, Hasbro and Electronic Arts realized that they would suffer an extreme backlash if they took away everyone’s favorite Facebook game without offering up an alternative. Now that the alternative is almost here, it remains to be seen whether they will try to eliminate the competition. In response to question about what Hasbro now plans to do about Scrabulous, spokesperson Gary Selby respondsl:

Hasbro has been consistent in stating that Scrabulous infringes upon our intellectual property, and we are keeping our legal options open. Today we are focusing on the coming launch of EA’s legitimate social networking version of SCRABBLE. We have no further comment at this time on Scrabulous and our legal strategy going forward.

What is clear is that if Hasbro and EA allow Scrabulous to live, the official version of Scrabble will have a hard time gaining any traction. Real Networks launched an offical version of Scrabble for Facebook members outside the U.S. and Canada a while back, and it has attracted a grand total of only 5,643 daily active users, compared to the 451,107 people who play Scrabulous every single day.

Because of the licensing issues, the EA version of Scrabulous will also be geographically hobbled. Only Facebook members in the U.S. and Canada will be able to play each other. If you live in the U.S. and want to play a friend in London, forget about it. Then there is the simple inertia of people who may see little point in installing the official version if they and all their friends already have Scrabulous installed.

What this means is that EA’s official version of Scrabulous, which it has committed resources to develop, may have little chance of success unless EA can get rid of Scrabulous first. But if EA and Hasbro try to push players to their version of the game by forcing Facebook to shut down Scrabulous, they will still have to deal with a lot of angry Scrabulous fans. Do people love Scrabble so much that they don’t care whose version they play, or will they boycott the game in solidarity with two developers in India? We may soon find out.

The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end. The Facebook version of Scrabble raised the ire of Hasbro and Mattel, which jointly own the rights to the game abroad and in the U.S., respectively. They have already asked Facebook to pull Scrabulous, one of the most popular apps on the social networking site.

So why is Scrabulous still up on Facebook? A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell?

And it might not end at Scrabulous. One industry source tells me that Hasbro is going after other knock-off games as well, and sending cease-and-desist letters to Facebook along with the infringing app developers, since it is the one hosting the games. So who might be next? Zynga, for one. The Mark Pincus startup that just publicly launched earlier this month—with $10 Million from Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Bob Pittman, and others—has games that are based on Risk (Attack!), Boggle (Scramble), and Battleship (Battleship). Zynga claims on its Website to have 1.4 million players of Attack!, 293,000 players of Battleship, and 257,000 players of Scramble. Battleship, Boggle, and Risk are all owned by Hasbro. If Mark Pincus has not already received a cease-and-desist letter, he will soon.

Social networks have been a boon for casual online gaming, because now it is easy to find someone you actually know to play with. But a safer strategy than knocking off traditional board games without licensing them first is to actually create original games. That is the tack the Social Gaming Network (SGN) is taking. It’s popular Facebook games include WarBook and Fight Club. Collectively, its games are generating more than half-a-billion page views a month. There is a business in there somewhere. SGN, which is part of Webs.com, is in the process of spinning off as a separate company. Maybe it should try to license those board games from Hasbro. Somebody should.

“Is Hasbro just a stupid Potato Head? Or is this a brilliant game of Stratego?” That’s the big question Fortune’s Josh Quittner (my former boss) asks as he reports that Hasbro, the toy company that owns Scrabble, is trying to shut down Scrabulous,
one of the most popular Facebook apps. Scrabulous lets you play an online version of Scrabble with your Facebook friends. The app boasts 569,000 daily active user, ranking it No. 9 right after Slide’s SuperPoke, No. 8, and ahead of iLike, No. 10.

Scrabulous co-founder Jayant Agarwalla, 21, confirms that Hasbro “sent a notice to Facebook about two weeks ago. The lawyers are working on it.” Quittner suggests that someone start a Facebook group to save Scrabulous, but we all know how much good that is likely to do.

Update: It’s official. See coverage here