Less than two days after it was pulled from Facebook after a lawsuit, the popular online version of Scrabble - Scrabulous - has returned.

At least, that is how some observers are seeing it. Another version of events is that the two Indian brothers who created Scrabulous have unveiled a "new wordgame" for Facebook - which bears remarkable resemblances to Scrabble.

In the new game, called Wordscraper, players compete to lay out words on a Scrabble-like board from a choice of seven letters at a time. But, the tiles are circular rather than square and players can fashion the rules as they please by shifting around "double world" and "triple letter" squares.

In theory, if a player decided that the version he or she liked best was one where the configuration of squares was identical to that on a Scrabble board, they could set that as their default set of rules and play the equivalent of Scrabble in every game.
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There also appears to be other quirks which distance the game from Scrabble, such as the option to include "quadruple word" squares, though the game and its rules were periodically inaccessible today.

The launch of Wordscraper comes less than 48 hours after the two Calcutta-based software developers - Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla - agreed to take Scrabulous down from the US version of Facebook following legal action from Hasbro, the toymaker, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the US and Canada.

At the time the application was removed, Jayant Agarwalla said: "This is an unfortunate event and not something we are very pleased about. We sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come."

Scrabulous, which was until recently played by 450,000 people around the world every day, still appears to be available to Facebook users outside the US, though it is reported to have suffered some down time in the last day or so.

There are also now two official versions of Scrabble on the social networking site - one for the US and Canada, which has 63,000 users as of this afternoon, and an international version, which has 15,000.

It is unclear what the removal of Scrabulous from the US Facebook site will mean for non-US users of Scrabulous. Outside the US, the rights to Scrabble are owned by Mattel, owner of the Barbie toys, which has in the past said it will "actively protect" its brands and trademarks.

The long-running dispute between Hasbro and the Agarwalla brothers came to a head on Friday, when Hasbro announced it was suing the developers for breach of copyright and trademark.

In a statement earlier this week, Facebook - which has not created the game but merely provides the platform on which it is played - said that it was "disappointed" that Hasbro had drawn it into the dispute over Scrabulous.

The site, which is used by 80 million people worldwide, said that in the future it hoped similar disputes could be resolved in a manner that "doesn't discourage other developers from using the Facebook platform to test new ideas."