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Fake Scrabulous

Submitted by: thecougar
Created: Mar 30, 2008, 2:23 pm

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The Idea

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is a simple Scrabble clone called "Scrabulous". My idea is to create a Scrabbulous clone with a twist - when you send out an invite to a friend, they always seem to get the “bad luck” of having the following letters: Q X W V W Z V. Of course, it will be doubly frustrating when you are constantly scoring 7-letter “bingos“, which is insanely easy given that you can choose any letters you want.

This would be a easy and fun way to play a little practical joke on your friends, and can take advantage of the wave of popularity around Scrabulous to quickly gain a viral cult following of its own.

I thought of this idea when I was...

Thinking of a good April Fool's prank to play on some of my friends.

Comments Posted

DTINGG Posted: April 2, 2008, 5:06 pm

It made me laugh out loud... And that is just the idea of it... Do it!

PhilipH Posted: April 3, 2008, 4:56 am

I wonder about the legal issues here... presumably you're intending for the application to look very like the original Scrabulous? In that case, the original developers could have a few things to say. The only way of making it work might be to go through them.

Of course, the alternative is to develop a fully-featured alternative Scrabble game so that I can play a dozen "normal" games before switching prank mode on. Seems like an awful lot of work for an April Fool's joke though...

thecougar Posted: April 4, 2008, 4:56 pm

Good point about the legal issues, but I highly doubt that the Scrabulous guys would have any sort of case given that they are directly ripping off Scrabble. I would maybe worry about Scrabble's trademark owners (Hasbro) but given that they were unsuccessful at shutting down Scrabulous, I dobut they'd bother with a little fake Scrabulous clone...

Kevin_Cox Posted: April 4, 2008, 8:31 pm

So, you just want a hacked version of Scrabulous, to cheat against your friends?
It sounds like a lot of work, to remake the entire game just to do this.

landsky Posted: April 5, 2008, 4:11 pm

I guess. Kind of like finessing off the queen of spades in Spades.

daraddishman Posted: April 8, 2008, 11:55 am

It is against the Facebook Developers ToS to build an application that misleadingly emulates another application.

That being said, I love pranks...

GordonMcDowell Posted: April 9, 2008, 10:48 am

Great idea but sounds like too much work to me for something that might get quickly taken down.

Perhaps there is a website which is popular but you could make a bogus interface for, so you're basically tweaking the user experience?

Or... remember the "Deviency Quiz" or "Purity Test"... whatever it was.

Well how about a website that allows you to type in a name, and it responds with a matching GUID. You pass the "Purity Test" URL on to your friend, looks like...

puritytest-dot-com?id=387475

You've typed in your friends name of course to return that ID. Now when your friend completes the quiz, the final score is...

"Congradulations GORDON MCDOWELL you have scored 0.34 on the purity meter!" Complete with a summary of all their answers. And an email is fired off to you so you can review and share their responses with all their friends.

Anyway, that'd be easier to do.

Hello!

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