The man who invented Scrabble was almost comically unassuming. Alfred Butts was just over 5½ feet tall, bone-thin, bespectacled, and a collector of postcards. One of his few indulgences, appropriately, was the letter-bearing candy M&Ms. He had minor talents in many fields — painting, writing, architecture — none of which provided him much of a living. Even at his own game, he was middling. He was a bad speller, as he often told his Scrabble opponents. He considered it a good game if he managed 300 points, even though his wife, Nina, once earned nearly that many by playing one word, quixotic, across two triple-word-score squares.
Whatever his shortcomings, Alfred did have the qualities necessary to invent Scrabble, the most enduring, endlessly variable, fanatically played board game of the last century: meticulousness and tenacity. He deconstructed games into three categories — number games, move games and word games. He analyzed tens of thousands of words to determine the frequency of letters, and assigned points and numbers of tiles accordingly. It took two difficult Depression-era years for Alfred — laid off from his architecture firm and unable to earn much with his essays or his watercolors — to come up with a game he called Lexico, a combination of anagrams and crosswords, a game that required both skill and luck.
Alfred played the proto-Scrabble, which had no board, with friends, and sold sets to a few people for $1.50 in the winter of 1933. Within a year he had sold 84 games, lost $20 for his efforts and received rejections from Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers and Simon & Schuster.
Rather than continuing to peddle Lexico, Alfred tinkered with his game in hopes of making the manufacturers reconsider. He decided to give Lexico a board, which word games ordinarily did not have. He added high-scoring squares, kept triple-word-score spots on the fringes of the board, decided against a quadruple-word-score square, and opted to have game play begin in the center of the board, rather than in the top corner, as with crossword puzzles. Alfred cut cardboard and drew the grids himself, and pasted letters onto balsa-wood squares. The new game, dubbed Criss Cross Words and finished in 1938, went for $2 a set plus 25 cents shipping.
After nine more years of rejections from manufacturers and piddling sales, Alfred further fine-tuned his creation, working with one of the few owners of a Criss Cross Words set, businessman James Brunot. The two men simplified the rules and color-coded the high-scoring squares in red, pink and blue, making for a more attractive board. Brunot and his wife trademarked a new name in 1948: Scrabble, which means to grope frantically (describing at the same time the choosing of letter tiles and the desperate brain-cudgeling that often precedes moves). Alfred authorized Brunot to produce and sell the game, and was so deferential toward his partner that when he wanted two sets as Christmas gifts, as Stefan Fastis reported in his book “Word Freak,” he asked Brunot how much he owed.
The first years of Scrabble sales were stronger than Butts’ years working alone. Brunot took out a few ads and manufactured the game from his house, but he still lost $450 on his sale of 2,400 games. Fortunately, one of those sets went to a powerful fan: Macy’s chairman Jack Straus, who got hooked on Scrabble while vacationing and insisted that Macy’s start stocking it.
This was the game’s big break. By the mid-1950s, millions of Scrabble games had been sold, and many imitators had been squashed by Brunot’s lawyers. (Had Brunot been around to see the rise of Scrabulous on Facebook in 2007, that game, and the several others still operating like it, might not have lasted so long.) The pastime that Alfred thought would lighten Depression days seemed ideally suited to the next generation of Americans: a wealthier, better-educated, more leisurely group. Scrabble appealed to those with no patience for the dreary moralism of The Game of Life, the pure chance of Bingo, the complex strategy of chess, or the dull repetition of most board games, with their narrow options and simple ends. Future word games — Boggle, Upwords, Bananagrams — would never match it. Scrabble appeared in foreign-language versions, junior and deluxe and travel editions, and spawned its own controversial and oft-revised dictionary.
For decades — as Scrabble was sold to Selchow & Righter (best known for Parcheesi and Trivial Pursuit), then to Coleco (the Cabbage Patch makers) and finally to Hasbro — Alfred collected royalties and stayed obscure, living in a small apartment in Queens, N.Y., with his wife. He was never the type of player his game spawned and favored: an obsessive who could tease anagrams from seemingly infertile sets of tiles, as if pulling a photograph into focus. Alfred never memorized every two-letter word, all the variations of djinn, or all the words featuring a Q and no U. He could probably not survive a game with a Scrabble champion, who would know that every letter of the phrase “Betsy’s foot” can be attached to the word KA to make a playable three-letter word, or that every consonant of “knight swam” can attach to AE (Scottish for “one,” and an acceptable play). Alfred did media interviews when asked, but often didn’t know the answer to the technical Scrabble questions asked therein. He attended his first North American Scrabble championship in 1983, five years after the contests started. He watched from a corner.
Alfred’s only attempt at the spotlight came two years later, in 1985: He created a new game, a solitary version of Scrabble. Each set came with four single-player boards; between one and four players could aim for the highest score on their separate boards. For the cover of the game, Alfred donned a tuxedo and sat in a wine-colored leather wingback chair. On the armrest perched a pretty woman in a strapless black cocktail dress. And on a nearby end table, where a gun or a Scotch might have been appropriate, lay the decidedly unglamorous game board. The game’s title captured the strange position of its inventor as the unfairly unknown creator of a world-renowned pastime. It was called Alfred’s Other Game. And it never quite took off.
Swati Pandey is a writer living in Los Angeles.