#173: Scrabble – Strategic Crossword Empire

The Empire Builders Podcast

Alfred Butts worked on this game from 1938 until 1949 and then gave up the rights to James Brunot for royalties.

Dave Young:

Welcome to The Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

Welcome to Empire Builders podcast. I’m Dave Young. I’m sitting here with Stephen Semple. Well, I’m not sitting here. We’re recording this. He’s in wherever he is, and I’m wherever I am. You know this world, you know how it all works, the Zoomee River. Anyway, boy, I’ve led us right off into the weeds right from the start.

Stephen Semple:

Well done.

Dave Young:

Stephen told me the topic for today. It’s another game.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, another game.

Dave Young:

A lot of empires in the game world.

Stephen Semple:

Completely.

Dave Young:

This one, I’m interested in the story. I’m not a very good player of it because I don’t have very much experience with it. This is another one of those that we just didn’t play that much, but I was aware of, and there are people that are just fanatics for Scrabble. They play all kinds of word games, and I probably got into word games a little late in life. I don’t know if my family was … I don’t know what it is, Stephen. Maybe we were just Chinese Checkers people.

Stephen Semple:

And I’m with you. Now it’s interesting how you started this podcast because as soon as I said Scrabble, your brain got a little bit scrabbled.

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

But I didn’t play Scrabble much. It’s not a game that I enjoyed and I found actually almost frustrating.

Dave Young:

Kind of stressful, right? Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. But it’s surprising how big a game it is. As of 2008, which was the most recent information I could find on this, it was sold in 121 countries, 30 languages. Although how do you do 30 languages? It’s like, yeah, but 150 million sets have been sold worldwide. But here’s the one that surprised me. It’s roughly one third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set.

Dave Young:

Really?

Stephen Semple:

Yes. And there’s 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world. It is everywhere. It is literally everywhere.

Dave Young:

It really is a game of skill, at least when it comes to having a vocabulary and keeping an eye out for possibilities and the different points on letters and things like that. And just I’m looking for reasons that maybe I didn’t play it very much.

Stephen Semple:

And I’m with you. I didn’t play it much either.

Dave Young:

I’ve enjoyed it when I’ve played it. It’s always been somebody else’s Scrabble set. I’ve never owned a set. So tell us how it started.

Stephen Semple:

It’s quite an old game, actually. I was surprised when I came across it. It was invented by Alfred Mosher Butts in 1938.

Dave Young:

1938.

Stephen Semple:

So it’s actually a very old game. I was quite surprised by that. And he was an architect, and he lost his job because think about 1938, late ’20s, early ’30s, Great Depression, how many architects, how many buildings are being built?

Dave Young:

By ’38, we started thinking about how we’re going to have to be building tanks soon.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Well, it would have been a very, very tough time. And so he’s struggling to make ends meet, and he starts to notice the increased popularity in board games. But he doesn’t have money to go out and do things or money to buy games, so he’s trying to find ways to pass time, but he also then starts thinking about, is there a game I can create to make money? And you notice that there’s three basic games at the time, man-on-board games like Monopoly.

Dave Young:

You’ve got a player that you’re moving around the board.

Stephen Semple:

Yes. Card games and word games. And of the first two, there was quite a few, but there were not very many word games out. So there was a lot of man-on-board games, a lot of card games, but not very many word games. And most of them are anagrams where you form a word, try to add to another, or things along that lines. And he looks at it and he says, “Maybe I can make a better version of a word game.” Because the other thing he noticed with a lot of the word games is that we use more of certain letters. We use a lot more E’s than we use of Q’s.

Dave Young:

You think about Wheel of Fortune, and everybody gets the R, S, T, L, N, E, or whatever it is, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. And he remembered a story that he had read by Edgar Allan Poe in the story Gold-Bug. And there’s a sequence where the characters try to break a code, and Poe lists letters in the order of their use in English to solve it. Alfred went and he researched it, and he went, “Poe was not exactly right.” Now, think about how big a job that is in the 1930s to research words and how many times a letter is used.

Dave Young:

You can’t just dump it into a computer and ask for the count.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. Took him two years to research that, and the first version of the game was not called Scrabble. He called it Lexiko, which was an odd game. And there was tiles, but no board, and there was 100 tiles and a point system for the letters, and you try to create as many words as possible. He made the tiles in his apartment. It’s 1934, and he sells a few dozen of these games, a few bucks each. It’s not successful. And he sends it to some game companies, and they reject it. And part of what he recognized was it needed to be tweaked to be more fun. So it’s 1938, and he’s looking at crossword puzzles, because originally it was just you made names. That was the first version of it. You made names.

Dave Young:

Just see how many names-

Stephen Semple:

You got points based upon the letters. Crossword puzzles catches on, and it inspires him to change the game to a board game because there was no board yet. It was just the tiles. So the whole idea is, let’s do it like crossword, where you build off of other words, right?

Dave Young:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

But then he also has the idea that really changes things. It changes it into a strategy game, where he adds values on the board, bonus squares. And if you notice, the high scores are towards the edges of the board because those are the ones that are hardest to fill because now you also have restricted real estate at the edge of the board. So it now turns this word game into a strategy game, and he calls it Criss-Cross Words.

Dave Young:

Criss-Cross Words.

Stephen Semple:

Criss-Cross Words, still hard to sell.

Dave Young:

Not super catchy.

Stephen Semple:

Still hard to sell the game. Game companies still reject it. He sells about 100. He gets a job. Outbreak of World War II, puts the game on the back burner. So it’s 1949, and a stranger shows up at his house, James Brunot, who got a copy of the game and liked it. He makes Butts an offer, rights for the game and royalties, and he renames it Scrabble. So it’s James Brunot who renames the game Scrabble, and he decides to publish it himself. He’s a farmer, raises sheep, he has a barn on the property. So he publishes it, manufactures the tiles all himself, but Scrabble still struggles. He sells a few thousand between 1949 and 1951. Then all of a sudden, 200 boards a week order comes in, and then all of a sudden, 1,000 orders comes in, and he’s like, “What the heck happened?”

Dave Young:

“What’s going on?”

Stephen Semple:

“What’s going on?”

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off, and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

Macy’s put in a big order. To this day, no one knows what caused it. The theory is the CEO played the game and liked it. And then once Macy’s started to carry it, because remember at the time, Macy’s was the big retailer, the big powerhouse of the day, everyone followed. The game explodes. By 1953, sell a million copies. By 1954, 4 million copies. Now, here the funny thing is. Butts, who had sold the game for royalties, was used to getting these checks for a couple of bucks to the point where he wouldn’t always open his mail. James Brunot was an honest guy. He sent the check every month. All of a sudden, opens a check, $81,000, equivalent to a million bucks today.

Dave Young:

Wee-haw.

Stephen Semple:

Could you imagine the shock? You all of a sudden open it up. It’s like, what the heck? And then all of a sudden, this big check shows up for Butts because it went forever. This game basically went … This game, you think about the original version of the game he launched, so you think about it, he launched the game in 1938. He worked on it for a bunch of years, and then along comes James Brunot. Suddenly, it’s 1954, almost 20 years later, that the game explodes.

Dave Young:

That’s a slow boil, isn’t it?

Stephen Semple:

A slow boil, yeah.

Dave Young:

I love the story, that he just didn’t even bother opening the checks till a whole bunch of them showed up. You wonder, it got really popular. I can picture him going to visit family, and they’re like, “Hey, you want to play this game?” He’s like, “What game? Wait, this is my game.” “We bought it at Macy’s.” That had to be fun.

Stephen Semple:

And look, and nobody knows, but it makes for a great story. The story is that he had three or four stacked up, and he was opening it, and it’s a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks, a hundred bucks, 81,000.

Dave Young:

This is a typo. It must be.

Stephen Semple:

But the part that I do love on it is James Brunot. Sometimes we hear these stories when these things take off, and the original owner gets screwed over and things like that. None of that happened with Butts. And it’s also interesting when we think about this whole thing of how did you hear about us in terms of people trying to track back, well, what made it successful, no one knows. The rumor is the CEO played the game. No one knows for certain, but somehow somebody at Macy’s found out about it. How did they find out about it? Played the game. Neighbor shared the game. So sometimes these things are just, you will never know how A led to B, right?

Dave Young:

If Macy’s hadn’t have made that order, we still wouldn’t be talking about Scrabble, most likely.

Stephen Semple:

Probably not. It needed to be Macy’s or some other big giant.

Dave Young:

Very cool.

Stephen Semple:

To me, it was this really interesting, how did James Brunot find out about it? Now, we do know that part because James Brunot played the game and approached him and said, “Hey, I’d like to make this game and distribute this game.” And to a degree, I wonder, did that also help give it that next 10 years? Because there’s a certain point where I’m sure Butts would have been like, “You know what? I’m just going to give up on it.” He had a job. He had been pounding away at it for a whole pile of time. Did that also give it that willingness to push through for the next bunch of years? Because eventually these things lose steam.

Dave Young:

Interesting. That game has stood the test of time, and there are still people that just love it and play it all the time. There became electronic versions, Words With Friends, those kinds of things, where I remember in the early days of Facebook for older people, not the early days of Facebook for college kids, that there were a lot of people playing that. I think it’s actually probably one of the games that at Wizard Academy, down at Engelbrecht kitchen, is played as much as anything down there.

Stephen Semple:

Oh, is that right?

Dave Young:

This is purely anecdotal. When people stay on campus, I’ve wandered down there and, oh, they’re playing Scrabble.

Stephen Semple:

But the other part I find interesting was, again, he saw a word game being played with tiles, and then he made the change of giving points to the letters. But to me, the really brilliant thing was looking at a crossword puzzle and saying we could add that into it, but he didn’t just add adding the word to the other. By putting different values on the board, not only did it create a different dimension to the game, because then there’s always that chance you can narrow the gap by one of those word multipliers. It made the game strategic, and that’s what I think is really cool about Scrabble. It’s a word game that also has strategy to it.

Dave Young:

The thing is crosswords are pretty solitary endeavors, right?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Dave Young:

It’s me against the puzzle.

Stephen Semple:

That’s true. I hadn’t thought about that yet.

Dave Young:

This lets you play with four people. Nobody finds you very interesting if you’re just sitting alone doing a crossword puzzle. But if you’re playing Scrabble, all of a sudden it’s a social activity.

Stephen Semple:

It’s a social activity. It’s a game that you’re playing with others.

Dave Young:

And you can still be probably fairly serious and maybe introverted with it. You’re competing, and there’s some strategy involved, and you can still show off your word-making skills and your vocabulary. It’s a smart person’s game, isn’t it?

Stephen Semple:

Yes. Maybe that’s why you and I didn’t play it.

Dave Young:

Maybe that’s why you and I don’t know.

Stephen Semple:

Thanks for pointing that out, Dave.

Dave Young:

Because you have the vocabulary of, I don’t even know what.

Stephen Semple:

If I could think of the word, I’d use it in Scrabble.

Dave Young:

Exactly. If I owned a thesaurus, I’d come up with a proper insult for you, but …

Stephen Semple:

Well, thanks for solving that little riddle.

Dave Young:

We’ve got a list of games. Stephen, we are going to have to just get together for a week sometime and play games.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, we do. Yeah, we do need to do that.

Dave Young:

Maybe that’s something we need to do in Austin at some point is just have game week in the basement of the tower, where we just sit and-

Stephen Semple:

There we go. That would be fun.

Dave Young:

All right. It’s Scrabble Day.

Stephen Semple:

That one I’m not looking forward to. All right. We’ll do it. Thanks, Dave.

Dave Young:

Lawn darts. I’m in for Lawn Darts.

Stephen Semple:

Lawn Darts, there you go. I like that one.

Dave Young:

Thank you, Stephen.

Stephen Semple:

Thanks, David.

Dave Young:

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