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EA has announced the release of Scrabble for Facebook. I had a chance to play Scrabble when it was in beta and it was a lot of fun to play. There was an issue or two that I ran into when playing, but that was the beta version so hopefully the release version has fixed the issues.

Players will need a Facebook account, which is free, to play Scrabble. Players install Scrabble like any other application on Facebook and can start challenging their friends to a game. Of course, their friends will need to have scrabble installed as well. The initial start screen asks for a name of the game and up to three friends to challenge. Players can type the names of their friends and the game searches through your list bringing up the friends with the letters in their name that you have typed so far. For instance, if Joe is my friend I can type Jo and it will show me all of my friends that begin with Jo.  Nice little feature that saves some typing.

The game play is just like scrabble. Players have a 15 by 15 board where the letters are placed. As with the board game scrabble, the first player starts with a word and places the first letter of the word on the star on the board. Game play continues as each player makes a word in succession using letters from other words already on the board. The game ends when one of the players has used all of their letters. This was one of my “issues” with the game. There needs to be another option to win, like the person with the highest score. The game should be smart enough to know if you can use the letters you have left and then give you the option to end the game and the person with the most points wins. This may not be how the scrabbles rules are suppose to work, but I got into a game where neither of us could use our remaining letters so we just sat there and no one won and the game didn’t end. The other option is to have something that just ends the game besides a forfeit. There doesn’t have to be a winner per se, but have the game come to a conclusion besides having to forfeit.

The Scrabble interface is easy to use. The people that are playing are up in the top left corner of the interface and down below that is an area to chat. The chat area has three tabs, the first is a chat tab, the second is a dictionary to make sure the word you want to create is valid and the third tab keeps track of the moves that have been made. When it is your turn to play, your picture is highlighted and the other players pictures are dimmed. The person I was playing with had a hard time telling when it was their turn, but I was able to tell no problem.  Players have a few options to choose from when it is their turn. They can spell a word, shuffle their letters, arrange the order of the letters or swap the letters with ones from their bag. Swapping letters causes your turn to be over.

There were a few times throughout the game where I lost connection to the server. The game would just attempt to connect to the Scrabble server, but nothing was happening. When this occurred, I would leave the game and come back in and everything would fix itself. Leaving the game does not cause the other players to have to leave and the game state is saved, so really it is just an annoyance and nothing is lost.

Over all Scrabble was a lot of fun to play and fit well into Facebook. Both Facebook and Scrabble are social entities so the pairing works well. The challenge that Scrabble offers is fun and entertaining. It can be pretty difficult to look at the board and then the letters you have and figure out what to spell next.

If you are into word games and have a Facebook account, I recommend trying Scrabble.