SCRABBLE

Scrabble is a game that we have all played at some point in our lives. For those of who don’t know about it, it is a word game played by two to four players. The players score points by creating or rather forming words out of individually lettered tiles on a bored marked by a fifteen by fifteen grid.

SCRABBLETHE GAME dates far back to 1938 when an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation to an earlier word game he invented called Lexiko. The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out meticulously, performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources including The New York Times. The new game, which he called “CrissCrosswords,” had the addition of a 15-by-15 game board and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.

IN 1948 A US citizen named James Brunot bought the rights to start manufacturing the game. Though he left most of the game (including the distribution of letters) unchanged, Brunot slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also changed the name of the game to “Scrabble.” Over the years different people kept buying over the rights of the game and finally in 1984, Scrabble was turned into a daytime television show on NBC.

THE SCRABBLE BOARD features “premium” squares, which multiply the number of points awarded: eight dark red “tripleword” squares, 17 pink “doubleword” squares, 12 dark blue “triple-letter” squares, and 24 light blue “double-letter” squares. However these were changed in 2008 by Hasbro – orange for Triple Word , red for Double Word, blue for Double Letter, and green for Triple Letter.

THE ENGLISH VERSION of the game comprises one hundred tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10. The number of points of each lettered tile is based on the letter’s frequency in English writing; commonly used letters such as E or O are worth one point, while less common letters score higher, with Q and Z each worth 10 points. There are also two blank tiles that are unmarked and carry no point value; they can be used as substitutes for any letter; once laid on the board.

PLAYERS PLAY the game by picking seven tiles randomly from a bag and the player with the letter closest to the first letter in the alphabet has to take his turn first after which players keep drawing tiles until the bag is empty.

SCRABBLE IS TRULY a wonderful game. Go get a board and play it, I am sure that you will get addicted to it in no time.

  • Daily Mirror
  •  REIHAN STEPHEN

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