Scrabble is a classic board game invented in the late 1930s and first commercialized in the 1950s. It’s played by millions worldwide, both casually and competitively.

My love for Scrabble began about ten years ago when I started playing on the online Facebook app made by EA games. Words With Friends was a popular game at the time, but I opted to stick with the traditional board layout and point distribution of the original Scrabble game. I played pretty consistently over the years on EA’s Scrabble app, purchasing the full premium version on three different devices.

The main draw for me is the perfect mix of luck and strategy. Every play is an entirely new problem to solve. Sometimes you don’t get a good draw, but you do the best you can with what you get. And the thrill of playing all seven tiles for a 50-point bonus is what you play for game in and game out.

I’ve had my complaints about the EA app, the biggest being that solo games against the computer seemed pretty rigged. Tile draws on the harder difficulty levels didn’t seem to be truly random. I felt like my rack was constantly littered with V, C, U and I, more so than it would be with a physical bag of tiles. Another complaint had to do with the game controls getting mixed up with some of iOS’s new screen gestures on the iPad. Little did I know it was about to get much worse.

Thursday morning as I fired up the Scrabble app as usual, I got a pop-up, which was a notice from EA that its relationship with Hasbro and Mattel, the owners of the trademark, was soon coming to an end. The app was no longer available to download from the App Store and would no longer be supported after June this year. The note informed that the EA app would replaced by a new Scrabble app, made by another developer named Scopely.

My initial thoughts were optimistic. I thought that this could only mean that improvements would be made, and I am usually very welcoming of improvements. Then I downloaded the app.

Scrabble Go Home Screen

I didn’t expect at all to see what I saw on the home screen. I expected to see a way to start a game, and an area where I would find my active games — games against the computer and games against other people with a clear indication of which games in which it was my turn. Instead a saw a mess of bubble gum graphics and an overload of animation.

The first thing I wanted to do was start a game against the computer, so I clicked on the “Start New Game” button I found sandwiched between two carousels.

Start New Game Screen

What followed was even more confusion. I saw a bunch of options to start games with people I didn’t know, but no option to play against the computer. Finally after searching around on this screen I scrolled the carousel under “More Games” all the way to the right. There was a tile labeled “Practice Mode: Play Scrabble with Zoey.”

“Who is Zoey?” I thought. Is that just another one of these people I don’t know? I wasn’t sure, but I suspected this must be what I was looking for so I selected it.

Game Screen

Finally it looked like I was successful in starting an actual Scrabble game, but I still wasn’t entirely sure that Zoey was the computer and not a real person. I decided to roll with it anyway. At first glance the interface wasn’t all that bad. The board was clearly displayed and the tiles were super legible. There was even a nice new perk where the play would outline in green if it was valid before you hit “Submit.” However, I quickly started to notice lots of things I didn’t like.

The first of these was the row of icons above the game board. One of them plays a random word from your rack. The second is a bonus swap where you can swap your tiles without losing a turn. The third is a hint that shows you all the playable areas on the board. Apparently you can win or purchase these boosters, which I would never use and don’t mind they are available for the novice user, but I would rather play a game with standard tile exchange rules.

Boosters, Turn History, Social Share Screens

Another thing I’m not a big fan of is the choice of items on the bottom navigation menu. While the submit and shuffle buttons are clear necessities, I probably wouldn’t have included the turn history and social share buttons here. I would have used that real estate for something more useful in regular game play, such as swap tiles and number of remaining tiles in the bag, which are hidden away in the hamburger menu on the bottom left.

Hamburger Menu, Tile Bag, Tile Swap

The biggest problem I have with the app though has to do with flow of game play. I like to play fast games against the computer, so I want to play lots of moves in quick succession. Scrabble Go kills that for me though. Every turn is followed not only by ads, but also by popups suggesting other games and splash screens of level-ups and rewards, none of which is meaningful to me. And to get the ads removed, they are requiring a $4.99 monthly subscription.

Popups and Splash Screens that appear between moves

Reception of the app within the Scrabble community has been largely negative. The Scrabble International Facebook group posted a comment thread on Scrabble Go. There were comments about not having the right lexicons available, the animations being “unnecessary,” and about dissatisfaction with the barrage of jewels, tile sets, level-ups and cheats. Reviews on the app store feature comments such as, “Scopely ruins another classic,” “Awful in every way,” and “Not for the serious player,”

When I speculate about the people for whom Scopely designed this app, I can think of at least three customer arch-types they had to be thinking of. First, I think of serious Scrabble players, people who play in tournaments, know all 1000 of the three-letter words by heart and routinely play words like “zineb” and “quixotic.” The second group is the typical casual scrabble enthusiast. This includes the grandma who’s played in her living room since the 1970s and has few dazzling words up her sleeve. She knows all 100 of the two-letter words, but doesn’t necessarily play competitively or study new lexicon updates.

The third group is one that I don’t know a whole lot about and I’m not sure Scopely has quite nailed down either. It’s the group that doesn’t play Scrabble, but might if they had an app they enjoyed playing. This is the group that Zynga discovered with Words With Friends about a decade ago. With all the hints, boosters and level-ups, it’s clearly the group that Scopely is targeting with the design of Scrabble Go.

Tournament players are much more interested in access to the latest lexicons. They’re also interested in things that replicate live gameplay, things like timers, tile swaps and challenges. The casual Scrabble enthusiasts will be most interested in straight-forward gameplay and would likely struggle with all the clutter found in the interface. That said, I know that these groups are willing to pay money for a quality Scrabble experience.

The targeting strategy is what I find to be the most interesting thing about this redesign. I get that Hasbro and Mattel want to grow the customer base for Scrabble and ultimately make it more profitable. I have no problems with that goal. I just find it a bit odd that they would try to do it in this way. If you have an existing, proven customer base that has historically paid for a product, why would you completely abandon this customer base for potential customers that are unproven and may or may not pay for your product? This redesign was a huge gamble at best.

Maybe Scopely has a good contingency plan. Maybe they are agile enough to respond to customer feedback quickly. I do expect to see some big changes in the first few updates that will hopefully make this app successful. I do want it to succeed and believe that it will take quite a bit of iterating to get this right.