An edition from the 1990s. The motto Det Klassiska Korsordsspelet means "The classic crossword puzzle game"A game of Alfapet played in Loviisa, Finland.
In 1954, the Swedish board game company Alga was granted a license by J. W. Spear & Sons to market Scrabble in Sweden. For almost four decades, Alga sold the game under the name Alfapet (wordplay on alfabet, the Swedish word for "alphabet".)[1] In the 1980s, Alga was bought by BRIO, which retained Alga as its board games division.[2]
In the early 1990s, Mattel acquired J. W. Spear & Sons and rescinded the BRIO/Alga license in order to market the game in Sweden themselves as Scrabble.[3]
However, BRIO/Alga retained the right to the name Alfapet, and quickly designed and marketed a similar word game using that name.[1]
The new Alfapet word game differs in several ways from the international game of Scrabble:[4]
The board has 17 x 17 squares (instead of 15 x 15).
There are more bonus squares (even quadruples) and also reduction squares.
There are 120 tiles (instead of 100) and the values differ from the Swedish Scrabble set.
The letter Q has a separate tile (but can only be played with a blank tile in Scrabble).
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
Upwords is a board game. It was originally manufactured and marketed by the Milton Bradley Company, then a division of Hasbro. It has been marketed under its own name and also as Scrabble Upwords in the United States and Canada, and Topwords, Crucimaster, Betutorony, Palabras Arriba and Stapelwoord in other countries. It is currently available as a board game and a digital gaming app.
Anagrams is a tile-based word game that involves rearranging letter tiles to form words.
Boggle is a word game in which players try to find as many words as they can from a grid of lettered dice, within a set time limit. It was invented by Allan Turoff and originally distributed by Parker Brothers.
Scrabble is an American television game show based upon the board game Scrabble. Contestants competed in a series of rounds to fill in words within a crossword puzzle for cash. Muriel Green of Exposure Unlimited developed the idea for a television game show based upon the board game concept. During 1983, Green convinced Selchow and Righter, who at that time owned the Scrabble board game, to license Exposure Unlimited to produce the game show. Exposure Unlimited co-produced the show with Reg Grundy Productions, and licensed the show to NBC. Scrabble aired on NBC from July 2, 1984, to March 23, 1990, and again from January 18 to June 11, 1993. Chuck Woolery hosted the program. Jay Stewart was the announcer for the first year. Charlie Tuna replaced him in mid-1985 and remained through the original run and the entirety of the 1993 revival.
Brio is a wooden toy company founded in Sweden. The company was founded in the small town of Boalt, Scania, Götaland in 1884 by basket maker Ivar Bengtsson. For a long time the company was based in Osby, Scania, in southern Sweden. In 1908 Ivar's three sons took the company over and gave it the name "BRIO", which is an acronym for: BRöderna Ivarsson (in) Osby. In 2006 BRIO moved its headquarters to Malmö, Scania. It is best known for its wooden toy trains, sold in Europe since 1958.
Editions of the word board game Scrabble in different languages have differing letter distributions of the tiles, because the frequency of each letter of the alphabet is different for every language. As a general rule, the rarer the letter, the more points it is worth.
Super Scrabble is a board game introduced in 2004 and a variant of Scrabble. It is played on a 21×21 grid board instead of Scrabble's usual 15×15, and uses twice as many letter tiles.
Scrabble variants are games created by changing the normal Scrabble rules or equipment.
Bingo is a term used in North American Scrabble for a play in which a player puts seven tiles on the board in a single turn. Mattel, the game's manufacturer outside North America, uses the term bonus to describe such a word. In French, it is called a scrabble. A player who does this receives a 50-point bonus, which is applied after the rest of the play is scored.
Tile tracking is a technique most commonly associated with Scrabble and similar word games. It refers to the practice of keeping track of letters played on the game board, typically by crossing letters off a score sheet or tracking grid as the tiles are played. Tracking tiles can be an important aid to strategy, especially during the endgame when there are no tiles left to draw, where careful tracking allows each player to deduce the remaining unseen letters on the opponent's final rack. The marking off of each letter from a pre-printed tracking grid as the tiles are played is a standard feature of tournament play.
Lexulous is an online word game based on the commercial board game Scrabble. It is run by an Indian company of the same name on a dedicated website, and is also available within the social networking site Facebook.
RSVP was a vertical version of Scrabble introduced by Selchow and Righter in 1958 and promoted as "3-D Scrabble". Two players spelled words using cubical tiles with letters on an upright grid board.
Wordscraper is a Scrabble-style word game formerly available as a Facebook application. It was created by the Agarwalla brothers Rajat and Jayant, creators of Scrabulous, and differs from Scrabble by having no fixed board design or tile distribution, instead prompting the user to choose their own.
Bananagrams is a word game invented by Abraham Nathanson and Rena Nathanson of Cranston, Rhode Island, wherein lettered tiles are used to spell words.
The Computer Edition of Scrabble, also known as Computer Scrabble is a computer version of the board game Scrabble, licensed from J. W. Spear & Sons and released by Little Genius for the Apple II in 1982. It was subsequently released for most home computers of the time.
A GADDAG is a data structure presented by Steven Gordon in 1994, for use in generating moves for Scrabble and other word-generation games where such moves require words that "hook into" existing words. It is often in contrast to move-generation algorithms using a directed acyclic word graph (DAWG) such as the one used by Maven. It is generally twice as fast as the traditional DAWG algorithms, but take about 5 times as much space for regulation Scrabble dictionaries.
Words with Friends is a multiplayer computer word game developed by Newtoy. Players take turns building words crossword-puzzle style in a manner similar to the classic board game Scrabble. The rules of the two games are similar, but Words with Friends is not associated with the Scrabble brand. Up to 40 games can be played simultaneously using push notifications to alert players when it is their turn. Players may look up friends either by username or through Facebook, or be randomly assigned an opponent through "Smart Match". Players can also find potential opponents using Community Match.
Edward Richard McDonald was a Canadian lawyer, politician and inventor. He served as a lawyer for more than 5 years.
Alga AB is a board game publisher founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1917. It was formed as a subsidiary of Pressbyrån, a chain of convenience stores. Alga took care of the distribution of postcards and writing materials. In 1938, it started manufacturing board games. In 1940, Pressbyrån itself took over the production of postcards, and the connection between Alga and Pressbyrån was broken by the Bonnier Group, which owned both companies. The old Alga was later transformed into Bokförlaget Forum, while the game production continued under the brand name Alga. It took over the publication of Monopol (Monopoly) from Åhlén & Åkerlund, another Bonnier company.
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