Scrabble Is Still A Great Board Game!Posted by Wynn Nieves on May 19th, 2021 Scrabble is probably the most popular games around. It is a word game where two to four players use individual lettered tiles to form words on a casino game board marked with a 15x15 grid. The lettered tiles are each worth a particular number of points, and the points are added up to obtain the player's score for that round. Additionally, there are squares on the board that double or triple the points of the tile placed t here . The overall game was invented by an architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, in 1938. He wished to create a new game, and analyzed what kinds of games were available. He discovered they fell pretty much into three categories: number games, such as bingo, dice;and dominoes; move games, such as chess and checkers; and word games, such as for example anagrams. Butts decided to make a game combining chance and skill, so he used top features of crossword puzzles and anagrams to make his game. To make his new game, he combined elements of doing anagrams and partly the method that you work a crossword puzzle. To select letter distribution, Butts studied the front page of THE BRAND NEW York Times and did painstaking calculations of letter frequency. His basic cryptographic analysis of English, together with the original tile distribution he exercised to match the letter frequency continue to be valid after all these years. His first word game was called Lexiko. Later he made a decision to create a variation with the board and crossword-type action and named it "Criss-Crosswords". It featured a game board manufactured from architectural blueprint paper glued onto an old chess board. Although Butts made a few sets of the game himself, he didn't have much luck selling the game, and no major game manufacturer would buy his invention. Later, around 1948, he met James Brunot. He owned one of many original Criss-Crosswords games, and bought the rights to manufacture the overall game from Butts in trade for a royalty on the sale of the games. Although he left the majority of the game exactly the same, he did change the rules to make it simpler to play. He also slightly rearranged the premium squares and changed the name to Scrabble. The game was not an instant success. Butts and his family made 2,400 sets of the game that first year, and lost money doing it. However, the game steadily grew in popularity. Then in the first 1950s, the president of Macy's tried the overall game while on vacation and liked it so much, he ordered it to market in his store. That has been the tipping point, and inside a year, Scrabble was so popular the games were being rationed to stores round the country. As Scrabble grew in popularity, it came to the point Brunot could no longer meet the demand, so he sold the manufacturing rights to Long Island-based Selchow and Righter (one of the manufacturers who, like Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley Company, had previously rejected the overall game). Selchow & Righter bought the trademark to the game in 1972. In 1986, Selchow and Righter sold the overall game to Coleco, who soon after went bankrupt. The company's assets, including Scrabble and Parcheesi, were purchased by Hasbro. Today Scrabble is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc. in the United States and Canada and of Mattel elsewhere. This game is so popular, it really is sold in 121 countries in 29 different language versions. A hundred and fifty million sets have already been sold worldwide, and sets are located in one from every three American homes. It will come in a typical, Deluxe and Junior edition, plus a travel edition. You will find a Spanish and a French version. It could be played on computers, Sony PSP, and the Nintendo DS.Like it? Share it! More by this author |