Oh, the joy of picking that single Z out of the Scrabble pile just when you also have e b r and a, on a lovely triple word score.
It's those moments that make Scrabble one of the most satisfying board games to play and it so happens that it is the perfect game for April, all because of one guy.
Alfred Mosher Butts was born one April in 1899 and he went on to become an architect and then an unemployed architect during the Great Depression. With time on his hands, Butts decided the design a board game.
He studied existing games and decided that they all fell into one of three categories. There were number games such as bingo or dice. There were move games like chess and checkers. And, there were word games like anagrams.
Butts wanted to invent a game that combined chance and skill. He conceived the idea of Scrabble as a sort of crossword created on the fly. To determine how many tiles he would need for each letter, he studied the front page of The New York Times. He made some good decisions. Of the 100 tiles in a Scrabble set, there needed to be plenty of Es (15) but not that many Ss (4). After all, he didn't want people to just go around making plurals.
Game makers didn't like the game, but Butts teamed up with a businessman who made and marketed the game. By 2009, more than 150 million Scrabble sets had been sold worldwide!
