Board game:Scrabble Crossword Game

Unemployment inspires creativity--at least in the case of Alfred M. Butts, an architect made idle by the Great Depression. Butts had time on his hands and play on his mind. Observing that the most popular games fell into three categories--numbers (bingo), moves (chess, checkers), or words (crossword puzzles, anagrams)--he devised a game that deliberately combined all three variations. His game included 100 tiles each bearing a letter of the alphabet used to form words on a square grid. Each letter carried a numerical value, and a player scored points by tallying up the values of the letters in the words her or she laid on the grid. The player with the highest score after all the tiles had been used won the game. Butts was a better game creator than marketer. He first called his game Lexiko, then renamed it Criss-Cross Words. A new name did little to improve sales. In 1948, Butts hooked up with James Brunot; between them, they refined the rules and design of the game and settled on yet another new name: Scrabble. By the early 1950s, the president of Macy's department store was himself hooked on the game and began selling it in the large store chain. The game's popularity has yet to wane: more than 2 million copies of the game sell annually in the United States, and millions more sell internationally.