As Scrabble’s modern update sparks backlash, Anna Moloney looks into the history of the board game – and its divisive nature
As Barbie fever fades to a muted pink, Mattel ruffled feathers anew yesterday with news that it would be updating Scrabble to make the board game less “intimidating”. A new double sided board will allow players to choose their own challenge level and use “helping cards” to cooperate, allowing for a less competitive experience more in tune with the desires of Gen Z, according to the toymaker. A simplified scoring system will also allow for quicker gameplay – music to the ears of many.
Ray Adler, head of games at Mattel, said the new version was designed to keep the game “inclusive”, with an appeal to “anyone who’s ever thought ‘word games aren’t for me’”.
Inevitably, not everyone is pleased, with culture warriors crying ‘woke!’ as keen wordsmiths look down their erudite noses at the tiled makeover. British Scrabble president Gyles Brandreth rushed to calm concerned puzzlers: “Change is inevitable. This is exciting news!” he reassured, while reminding the upset that the standard version would still be available to play.
It remains unclear whether there will be appetite for the diluted competitive nature of Scrabble’s new offering, with smugness one of the prime motivators of playing a mean game. Cheating is also known to be a crucial part of the fun. Mischief was historically built into the game though “brailling” (feeling around for blank tiles, identifiable by their lack of grooves) has become much harder since the standardisation from wooden to plastic tiles.
Nonetheless, encouraging research from 2022 showed that the Scrabble Go app ranked among the top 10 most popular games for unscrupulous players, with cheat codes for the game the sixth most searched for.
A game in evolution
This is not the first time Scrabble has looked to keep up with the times, with words such as “adorbs”, “bae” and “amirite” becoming Scrabble official in 2022, though you’d be hard pressed to try and sneak these words past purists. Official rules have also been updated multiple times in the game’s long history to clarify points of tension between violent families.
In 1999, for example, Mattel made it clear that a tile can be shifted or replaced until the play has been scored, contrary to the beliefs of many passionate players who insist your word is set into place once your finger is lifted.
Racial slurs were removed from the word list of the North American Scrabble Players Association in 2020, while Mattel itself moved to remove over 400 offensive words from its official list in 2021 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Can you imagine any other game where you can score points and win by using a racial epithet? It’s long overdue,” Mattel’s head of games told The Times at the time. The move did not come without controversy, with some high profile players quitting in response to the move, which they argued had been done for the benefit of PR rather than social good.
A brief history of
The game’s first iteration came in 1938, when New York architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game (then called “it”) as a way to provide diversion during the Great Depression. Butts chose the distribution of letters by counting letters on the pages of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post.
The game became Lexiko then Criss-Cross Words before sticking with Scrabble in 1948, when the rights of the game were bought by lawyer James Brunot. Brunot simplified the game and also added the 50 point bonus for anyone who uses all seven tiles in a single word – a blessing for Scrabble swots everywhere.
By 1954 the game was a winner, with nearly 4m sets sold. The rights to the game were sold to Hasbro in 1989, who then sold them onto Mattel in 1994 for a not-too-shabby $90m. By 2004, the game’s success was baked in, with Scrabble ushered into the US’s National Toy Hall of Fame, other incumbents of which include Lego, hula hoops and glass marbles.