A Brief Rant

Not cool bro.  Totally not cool.  There is some bad mojo pulsing through the board game community, and it is not sitting alright with me.  Just in time for the holiday season, iPhone app juggernaut Zynga overstepped it's bounds.  It was all fun and games when Zynga was busy stealing content and dominating the cellular games market.  Their arsenal of games includes "Words with Friends" and "Draw Something" among others.  The marvelous characteristic about these two games, however, is their originality social networking.

Zynga's game design model is built almost entirely around copying already successful games and fitting them into their marketing machine.  "Words with Friends"is a blatant rip-off of Scrabble and "Draw Something" is a blatant rip-off of Pictionary.  What Zynga lacks in originality though, they make up for in aggressive marketing an luring their players in through social networking.

Given my lack of interest in iPhone games, this was all fine and dandy.  I wasn't about to get all fired up because some conglomerate of pissed-off nerds found a way to game the iPhone app store.  They chose a digital life of piracy, and I was content to let them live it.  Then they did this: Words with Friends the Board Game and Draw Something the Board Game.  Wait...what?

Scrabble is a real-life game that dates back decades, and I've already discussed its legend and lore.  Now, all of a sudden, Word with Friends wants to enter the real board game arena?  The same can be said for Pictionary and Draw Something.  What gives?  You already stole their idea and presented it in a cheap online format, why did you have to go and sodomize their real life market?

Okay,  maybe it's not so bad.  After all, taking the games into real life does encourage the face to face camaraderie that I love.  It actually does cherish the in-person contact that we all should enjoy and embrace.  But why not Scrabble? When I read game reviews that highlight its great use in teh classroom for spelling and math, I can't help but wonder, "Why on earth don't you teachers know that Scrabble already exists?"  Which may be a bad sign.  What if people really don't know it exists?

To make matters worse, or slightly more ominous, Zynga teamed up with Hasbro to create the Words with Friends Board Game.  That's right, the same Hasbro that makes and sells Scrabble now makes and sells Words with Friends.  What scares me is that they made this business decision for a reason.  They realized that people weren't interested in put-lettered-tiles-on-a-board-to-make-words-and-score-points games the old-fashioned way.  They had to find a new way to reach their audience.

I'm not saying this spells the end of Scrabble because it's a pretty difficult beast to kill.  I just don't take comfort in this new flashy young kid in teh game community.  It's almost like Houdini trying to compete with Criss Angel.  At the end of teh day, they're really accomplishing the same thing, but let's be real, Houdini did it first and did it better. Criss Angel just has a TV show.

Fight the good fight Scrabble, I'm sorry Words with Friends had to show up.