History of scrabble board games

He sampled 12, letters and 2, words to come up with the — presumably — statistically reliable breakdown of letters. Then Alfred Butts called the game Lexiko. The game had no board. No dice. He added a board to Lexiko so words could be created crossword style, and called the game Criss-Cross Words.

He made the games himself, hand- lettering the tiles and gluing them to balsa wood. Somehow Butts came into contact with James Brunot, a former social worker looking to start a business in his home in Newtown, Conn. They struck a deal that gave Alfred Butts a small royalty for each copy of the game sold. Brunot bought strips of scrap lumber, silk screened letters onto them and hired woodworkers to saw them into tiles.

Brunot and his wife Helen renamed the game Scrabble and assembled 2, copies in their living room during But the Brunots soldiered along, selling a few hundred games a week, until one day in To keep up with demand, James and Helen Brunot moved production to an abandoned schoolhouse in Newtown, then to a converted woodworking shop.

He also noted, " Attempting to combine the thrill of chance and skill, Butts entwined the elements of anagrams and the classic crossword puzzle into a scoring word game first called LEXIKO.

Legend has it Butts studied the front page of "The New York Times" to make his calculations for the letter distribution in the game. This skilled, cryptographic analysis of our language formed the basis of the original tile distribution, which has remained constant through almost three generations and billions of games.

Nevertheless, established game manufacturers unanimously slammed the door on Butts' invention. It was only when Butts met James Brunot, a game-loving entrepreneur, that the concept became a commercial reality. Together they refined the rules and design and then, most importantly, came up with the name SCRABBLE - a word defined as 'to grasp, collect, or hold on to something'; and a word that truly captured the essence of this remarkable concept.

Pushing on, the Brunots rented a small, red, abandoned schoolhouse in Dodgington, Connecticut. Along with some friends, they turned out 12 games an hour, stamping letters on wooden tiles one at a time. Only later were boards, boxes, and tiles made elsewhere and sent to the factory for assembly and shipping. In fact, the first four years were a struggle. Mosher calculated the worth of each letter by noting how frequently it appeared on the front page of the New York Times.

The game soon became highly sought-after, and nearly four million sets were sold in only its second year of existence. From this early American success, Scrabble went on to become a similar sensation across the pond. In , Welsh became the most recent of the 29 languages into which Scrabble has been translated. Prince Charles. As Scrabble in its current form was invented in the same year that marked the birth of Charles, the Prince of Wales, in the game and the heir apparent shared their 60th birthdays.