The History Of Scrabble Game

Tweet

Scrabble is a good example of American spirit of perseverance and innovation. It is a very popular game and you can find the scrabble board in almost all homes. Since the invention of the game in 1931, 150 million sets of scrabble board games have been purchased in 121 different countries worldwide. This shows that it is not only popular in the United States, but also in other parts of the world too.

Inventor of the game

The game was invented by Alfred Mosher Butts, who was an architect. During the period of the Great Depression, Alfred Mosher Butts lost his job, and so he decided to do something different. He thought of inventing a board game, and started doing research on different types of games. After a thorough study, he found that there are generally three categories of games viz. number games, move games, and word games.

Dice and bingo are two popular number games, whereas chess and checkers are the best move games. In the word games category, only anagrams were popular. So, Butts thought of inventing a game, which had a combination of anagram and crossword puzzles. The original name of the game was called as “Lexico”, but later Butts called the game “Criss-Cross Words.”

Butts’s Methodology of Inventing the Game

At first, he started following the front pages of The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald Times. Then he calculated how frequently the 26 letters were used. He obviously found that the vowels were used the most, with the usage “E” being the highest among them. Then he assigned point values to the letters.

Since he did not want to make the game too easy, thus he decided to limit the use of “S”, which was only 4 times. His cryptographic analysis became popular, and it has been used in hundreds of word games. The very first board was hand drawn with the help of architectural drafting equipment, and the tiles were also handwritten.

Marketing of the Game

Initially Butts struggled to sell his game in his first few attempts. Later, he along with his game loving partner, James Brunot, he remade the rules and design. Then they named the game as “scrabble”. It was trademarked in the year 1948, and the first factory to make the scrabble board was an old schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut.

In year 1949, Brunot manufactured 2, 400 sets of the scrabble board, but he had to face a loss of $450 in his venture. The ownership of Scrabble was changed several times, and the recent owner of the scrabble is Hasbro Inc.

Scrabbles in Different Languages and Controversy with Its Online Version

With the increase in the popularity of Scrabble, it was translated into 22 different languages including Arabic and Afrikaans. Outside the United States, the game is sold by Mattel Inc., which is a rival company of Hasbro.

Controversy arose with the launch of “Scrabulous”, the online version of a word game. It was developed by two brothers, Jayant Agarwalla and Rajat Agarwalla from Calcutta in the year 2006. Now, that forced Mattel and Hasbro to file legal suit against them. Scrabulous has become one of the popular apps on FaceBook these days with more than 500, 000 players using it everyday. Hasbro has now dropped half of legal suit against the brothers.


This article has been written by Alex. I have written many articles on board games, and scrabble is one of my favorites. You could also check out the website, http://scrabblecheatsolver.com/ which is a great resource for scrabble players.