Lexulous is to Scrabble what Mafia Wars is to..Dope Wars?

These days I play Mafia Wars off and on over FB (Facebook to the uninitiated) - a very addictive game involving various "mafia gangs" (basically your Facebook buddies who have also signed in into the game). That, and my favorite all-time game Lexulous (not over FB, but the game site www.lexulous.com. The FB version is not timed and can take ages to finish, esp. while playing across timezones) and therefore is not a lot of fun for people living outside the States. There are some truly cool features about the FB Lexulous though - stats, bingo history, personal scratchpad, graph, etc...but nothing like a short and sweet game on the original game site. Infact, I realized I was faring much better against strong FB players because of my "honed" gaming skills on lexulous.com.

So, coming straight to the point, Lexulous is the (in)famous variant of the classic board(and now also online) word game, Scrabble. I love both of these games. I also loved a nifty little app called Dope Wars ages back - where you "buy and sell" all kinds of drugs on the streets of NY, LA, London, etc, earn tons of dough, launder it, bank it and become a "rich ganglord". So when I got caught into the hype called Mafia Wars over FB, I was pleasantly surprised. Except for the bells and whistles (armors, vehicles, buying and selling properties to make more money),the feel of the game seems so similar to Dope Wars..Apparently there are other apps out there that are similar if not identical to these games. So....how does anyone guard oneself (one's intellectual property)in the world of games? A slight twist - cosmetic or added bells and whistles - seem to be all that you would need to launch your own little online game. Is that it? Well, not quite. Even when the net is crawling with millions of variants of tetris and pacman (there's a pacwoman variant too!), card games galore - and now classic board games like Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, etc, very few actually catch the attention of people in droves. Lexulous and Mafia Wars are some of the lucky ones. Lexulous has managed to outwit Scrabble online in terms of hits, while Mafia Wars claims to have 4 million users accessing it in a month (atleast in June'09)! Incredible! Ofcourse, its not just luck in the virtual world that makes you tick. The interface, the user-friendliness, and that x-factor that only an avid game enthusiast/designer can build in into the game. These are some of the things that separate the men from the boys I guess...