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In the early 1990s, Mattel acquired J. W. Spear & Sons and rescinded the BRIO/Alga license in order to market the game in Sweden themselves as Scrabble.[3]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 invented by Elliot Rudell and originally published by the Milton Bradley Company, now a division of Hasbro. Worldwide marketing rights to Upwords have been licensed to Spin Master Inc. by Rudell Design, LLC as of 2018. Upwords is similar to Scrabble or Words With Friends, in that players build words using letter tiles on a gridded gameboard. The point of difference is that in Upwords letters can be stacked on top of other letters already on the gameboard to create new words. The higher the stack of letters, the more points are scored. This typically makes words built in later turns of the game more valuable than earlier words, increasing play intensity and adding a level of strategy unique to Upwords. The memorization of two-letter words is considered a useful skill in this game.
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. The game is played using a plastic grid of lettered dice, in which players look for words in sequences of adjacent letters.
Scrabble is an American television game show based upon the Scrabble board game. 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 the summer of 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.
Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan is a series of Japanese word puzzle video games developed and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, formerly Namco. The series began in arcades with Kotoba no Puzzle: Mojipittan in 2001, and has seen multiple sequels for several platforms, including the Game Boy Advance, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS. Gameplay is similar to Scrabble — players are tasked with using Hiragana to form words on a board by placing down pieces marked with Hiragana characters.
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 50-point bonus. The calculation of the bonus varies between the Hasbro and Mattel versions of the game, with the bonus applied before double- and triple-word scores multipliers in the Hasbro rules and after in the Mattel rules.
Tile tracking is a technique most commonly associated with the game of 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 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.
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 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.
Scrabble Showdown was an American game show created for the American cable network The Hub. The program was based on the board game Scrabble and was hosted by Justin Willman. It ran from September 3, 2011, to April 15, 2012.
Edward Richard McDonald was an adventurer, lawyer, politician, writer, inventor and family man. He had a long career of notable distinction as a lawyer spanning more than 50 years.
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