On Alfred, Inventor of Scrabble
AKA, The 40 Most Popular Board Games According to Ranker, Part 12 – Scrabble
Nobody has written a book about Alfred M. Butts, the inventor of Scrabble. To be honest, there isn’t a lot to say. He was a socially quiet man who liked games. When the Great Depression took his job away, he turned towards those games as a way to pass time. He recognized that the game industry was growing during the Depression; a lot of people were like Alfred in that they now found themselves with an embarrassment of leisure time. So he invented a word game called Lexiko and shopped it around to game manufacturers in an attempt to make a little scratch on the side.
It didn’t work. He tinkered with his game. He self-published. Time passed, and he found new jobs. More time passed, and an acquaintance offered to sell the game for him. Alfred relented. His friend made a few minor additions, simplifying some rules and adding a fifty point bonus for using all seven of your tiles in one go. The game was re-dubbed ‘Scrabble’. And it languished for four more years before Macy’s put in a large order, and profits exploded.
Alfred never expected world-renowned success. His contract didn’t allow him to rake in the money. But it’s said that he lived ‘comfortably’. As Scrabble passed hands from company to company, none of them were eager to put Alfred in the spotlight. Possibly because they saw Alfred as a potential threat. At any time, he could go to court. He could demand a larger share. If someone asks you about Scrabble’s origins, downplay Alfred’s involvement. For the love of Pete, don’t send any reporters his way.
But Alfred never seemed eager to claim that spotlight either. He toyed with a few other games, but only one was published under his name. It was another tile word game that encouraged simultaneous solitaire play by the fittingly humble title of ‘Alfred’s Other Game‘. By this point, he was an old man who never did sue any of the companies that produced Scrabble. Selchow & Righter felt comfortable enough to feature a photo of Alfred on the box of his other game, along with the Scrabble brand. In the photo, Alfred wears a tuxedo and sits in a leather upholstered chair. A young woman in an evening dress sits on one arm of the chair, hands crossed, giving her best smokey stare down the barrel of the camera. But Alfred is out of place and awkward. His legs are crossed, his pant leg is hiked up, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He looks sidelong at the camera, wondering how much longer he has to put up with this shoot. When can he ditch the tuxedo and put on a comfortable pair of slacks?
Alfred’s Other Game was a financial flop.
Not too long afterwards, Alfred was in a car accident. It shook him up bad. In the hospital, he suffered from delusions that his wife was still alive. He later survived a stroke. He needed care, and evidently his ‘comfortable lifestyle’ wasn’t comfortable enough to hire a live in caretaker. He spent the rest of his days in a nursing home. His son would visit him on occasion to play a game of Scrabble. Even when he couldn’t remember the names of the people who visited him, he could still play a mean game. He died in 1993.
~
For many other people who lost their jobs during the Great Depression, there was nothing left to do but play games. But Alfred was an architect. He studied structures for weaknesses and potentials. The only work published by Alfred that we have is an article for American Architect named ‘Pre-Planning Low Cost Housing Projects to Meet Economic Requirements’. It’s a no-nonsense dissertation that meticulously examines then breaks down its subject manner. So, true to form, when Alfred lost his architecture job he didn’t just play games. He studied games. He wanted to understand their weaknesses, and their potentials.
And one of the things he noticed was that there weren’t a lot of good word games. Sure, there were plenty of pencil and paper party games, and the tile game variations of Anagrams proved that word games could be marketable. But these games were missing something that canasta and bridge did well. These word games didn’t keep score. Winners were determined by the player who made the most words or the longest words; not by the player that made the best words. And these designs included seemingly spurious choices as to which letters appeared, and how often.
In Alfred’s library he kept a book of short stories by Edgar Allen Poe. If you opened that book, you could find a piece of paper shoved as a bookmark into the middle of ‘The Gold Bug‘. In this story, a treasure seeker named Legrand explains to a friend how to interpret a substitution cipher: a form of cryptogram in which each letter is substituted with another letter or symbol. Knowing which letters will most frequently appear can help crack these kind of ciphers, and Legrand tells his friend that “the letter which most frequently occurs is e. Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z.”
It’s a good thought. But it seems unlikely that Poe ever did a thorough study of the frequency of letters in the English language (or even double-checked his own work. Both j and v are missing.) Not knowing how Poe came to his conclusion, Alfred wasn’t content to trust Poe on his word. Instead, he pulled out a copy of the New York Times, underlined every word that was six-letters or longer, and counted the letters.
In his journal, Alfred wrote, “It follows that word games should be played not with a jumble of letters but with a mixture so proportioned that the individual letters will occur in the same frequency as they do in normal word formation.” Later, in the same journal, he suggested giving a selection of letters to start with, and to give players the ability to draw and discard letters. That would give the game “…a proper speed and snap; an excellent balance between the skill of the players and the luck of the draw.”
When Alfred made his first game, Lexiko, he gave a point value to each letter. The most common letters were worth only one point, but stumpers like q and x were worth many more. He also recognized the utility of the letter s, and how it could be slapped onto the end of most nouns and many verbs to make a new, longer word. So he restricted the letter s to only four tiles to ‘keep things challenging’. Finally, he drew upon a favorite pet rule when he was a kid, leaving a pair of blank tiles in the game to be used as wildcards.
Alfred shopped Lexiko around, but no one seemed interested. Manufacturers didn’t want another word game. They didn’t sell. New word games weren’t that special. They were usually just another bag of tiles, and a new set of rules. The manufacturers didn’t understand that by giving a point value to the letters, Alfred’s game was transformative, improving on the formula. They would have needed to spend time playing the game to realize that.
But in their own way, these manufacturers weren’t wrong. If they wouldn’t play the game, then neither would the public. Alfred realized his game would need something else for it to stand out among other word games. He needed a board. So he took a sheet of architectural graph paper, glued it to a chessboard, and used baseboard moldings to make tile racks. If a game uses a board, then there must be a purpose for the board. So Alfred filled in double and triple letter and word scores. He created a starting square with a star—first at one corner of the board, then slowly drifting to the center. Squares scattered and shifted as playtests continued. He found it was better to extend the more powerful squares away from the center, so as the game would become more dynamic as it advanced.
‘Lexiko’ became ‘Criss-Crosswords’, which became ‘It’. And while Alfred still couldn’t sell ‘It’, he continued to tinker until the game begrudgingly morphed into something similar to what we know today. And all the while, his wife Nina was Alfred’s ‘guinea pig’ to test new variations against. But it was still just an architect’s side project. An entrepreneur, James Brunot, needed to believe in the game, and work with it for another four years. And then a trend setter, Jack Strauss, the owner of Macy’s, needed to play the game, like it, and put in an order which reverberated among other stores, resulting in 6,000 game orders per week. And I think that’s important to remember; that a game doesn’t succeed or fail by the initiative of one person. Nina, James, and Jack all contributed something to this game. But these seats at the game room table were interchangeable. Scrabble wouldn’t be Scrabble without Alfred.
~
There are few board games that touched as many lives as Scrabble. Some cross and circle games, like Trouble and Parcheesi, can elicit excitement. Some negotiation games, like Monopoly and Catan, can encourage competitiveness. Scrabble inspires patience and thoughtfulness. Unlike a number of games at the top of this list, it rewards you for what you know, and encourages you to share that knowledge with your friends.
And in its purest form, that’s what tabletop games are all about: sharing an experience. Certainly, there are games we play to sharpen our skill, games we play because they scratch a itch to collect, and games we play as a form of escapism. But in our world of immediate satisfaction via flashing computer screens, the ritual of sitting down with friends can hinder those goals. When we sit down at a table to play games, we do it because humans are hardwired to share. What we crave is appreciation, or at least the knowledge that our actions are somehow meaningful. There are other ways to gain those things, but few are so direct as the immediate response of a player sitting across the table.
Alfred would probably tell you he didn’t make Scrabble for those reasons. In his mind, there was a natural order to these events. He was unemployed. Other people were unemployed. Consequently, he played games with other people. And because he wasn’t the sort of guy to be satisfied with only playing a game, he dissected games, which lead him to design a game. Or as he once put it, “That’s the trouble. I didn’t have anything to do; I didn’t have a job. So I thought I’d invent a game.”
But don’t let Alfred’s humility confuse you. He didn’t need to play games. He didn’t need to make a game. Alfred played games because he craved companionship and competition just like the rest of us. And he designed a game because he wanted to share.
