The economy is shattered, Iraqis scrabble for an ever-more-miserable living, hundreds of children die each week and Mr Hussein is still in power.
The following month, EA launched a version of Scrabble for mobile phones.
But they will change little for ordinary folk, who will continue to scrabble for what they can get, with both sides invariably ending up worse off.
With so few Indians willing to come clean, the perennially cashed-starved government has to scrabble every year for revenue.
The Kolkata, India-based brothers first created a Web site for playing an online version of the word game Scrabble several years ago, "just for the love of the game, " says Jayant, 21, who also runs an offshore Web development firm with his brother.
Seeing entries for Monopoly, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit (three Parker Brothers' board games), I was immediately struck by the absence of chess and backgammon.
These are more about interaction than action: players either join their friends for an online game of poker or Scrabble, or to create and show off virtual pets, farms and mob families.
Scrabulous makes it possible, for example, to recreate a big family game of Scrabble, even when family members are scattered around the world (assuming, of course, that all family members are tech-savvy enough to maintain a Facebook account).
Bill Gates can beat most of us at poker, software, Scrabble and deploying capital into any business, and a Silicon Graphics supercomputer easily outcalculates a Dell laptop for most functions.
Of the many slight flaws in this picture it is, for instance, overlong, overdecorated, overplayed, and scripted with less coherence than a Scrabble board the most troublesome is the evolution of old, cold houses, which were barely scary in the nineteen-sixties, into lumps of real estate.
As well, the company has launched some board game titles like Scrabble and Boggle through Pogo Games on Facebook, and soon plans to launch a new version of Monopoly for Facebook.
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