Answer: Alfreds Other Game

In the 1930s, Alfred Mosher Butts, an architect unemployed during the Great Depression, set out to make a board game. After studying the most popular games of the era, he found that many of them featured one of three key elements: number-based scoring, piece movement or tile laying, or word construction.

Butts combined all three with the grid-like construction of a crossword puzzle to create the game of Scrabble: the wildly popular tile-laying game where you score points by creating words. Given that the game has sold over one hundred and fifty million copies worldwide since its release and between one and two million copies are sold each year in North America alone, it hardly needs an elaborate introduction or explanation.

What most Scrabble fans are unaware of is that Alfred Butts released a second word game in the mid-1980s with the firmly tongue-in-cheek name Alfreds Other Game (without an apostrophe), playing on the idea that anything he created would always be known as the thing that wasn’t Scrabble. The game was also a word game, but featured a solitaire like design where up to four players could construct words on what amounted to private Scrabble boards.