April 13 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of Alfred Butts, a mild-mannered architect from New York City who invented the game of Scrabble. His time-honored invention is currently sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages. Approximately one-third of American homes have a Scrabble set. On average, eight games of scrabble are started every second.
Scrabble Origins
In 1931 Butts lost his job as an architect. He had always dreamed of creating a popular game and got a break-through idea while reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold Bug”. The short story features a character who decodes a message by comparing symbols to letters.
Butts pitched his new game, “Lexico” to Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley The companies passed but the determined inventor updated his game, adding the 15×15 board and crossword-style gameplay. He then spent seven years determining the correct balance of letters and point values. The final validation for his system was a frequency analysis he performed on the words appearing on the front page of the New York Times.
The game was renamed Criss-Crosswords. Butts built the copies himself, hand- lettering the tiles and gluing them to wood. Unable to sustain the grind, Butts sold the rights to James Brunot, a former social worker. Brunot agreed to pay Butts a small royalty for each copy sold. He renamed the game Scrabble, a real word which means “to scratch frantically”.
Starting In 1949, Brunot and his wife Helen assembled over 2000 copies per year in their living room but they made no profit. Their luck changed in 1952 when Macy’s ordered 2,000 copies. Jack Strauss, Macy’s president, had played the game on vacation and thought it would be a big seller. Sales skyrocketed and because Brunot could not keep up with demand, he licensed the manufacturing rights to an outside company. By 1954, four million copies were being sold per year.
Top Ten Board Games
Money Inc ranks the ten bestselling games of all-time as follows:
Chess- Difficult to estimate how many games have been sold since its invention 1500 years ago but three million chess sets are sold per year.
Checkers – Invented around 3000 BC, billions of copies have been sold.
Monopoly – 275 million copies sold.
Scrabble – 150 million copies sold.
Clue – Invented in England in 1949- 150 million copies sold.
Battleship – Has grown from being a paper game in the 1930s to a board game in 1967. 100M copies include video games, apps and electronic versions.
Trivial Pursuit – In 1979, Canadian journalists Scott Abbott and Chris Haney sat down to play scrabble but realized some pieces were missing. They invented their own game which has sold 100M copies.
Backgammon- Invented around 3000 BC, an estimated 88 million copies had been sold.
Candy Land – Eleanor Abbo designed the game in her hospital bed in1948 while she was recovering from polio. It became popular with the juvenile patients at the hospital and has gone on to sell 50 million copies.
Rummikub – OK, I was stumped on this one. It’s a tile based game that’s a cross between rummy and mahjong. Ephraim Hertzano, a Romanian Jew who emigrated to Israel after World War II invented Rummikub and originally sold his game door to door. Rummikub eventually became Israel’s top exported game. After its 1977 US debut, it has been a best seller (50M copies).
In case you were wondering
Pictionary ranks 13th and Risk is 15th.
The only number equal to its spelled-out scrabble score is twelve.
The highest Scrabble score ever received on a single turn is 1,782. Benjamin Woo added tiles to words already in place to form the word “oxyphenbutazone” (an anti-inflammatory drug). Playing it across the top of the board, Woo hit three Triple Word Score squares while making seven crosswords downward. He also received an extra 50 points for using up all seven of his tiles in a single turn.
Happy Ending
Mild mannered inventor, Alfred Butts retired on his Scrabble royalties which he said, “enabled me to have an enjoyable life.”