Scrabble

American architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1931 in Poughkeepsie, New York, building on an earlier word game of his called Lexiko and first naming the new version "Criss-Crosswords." To set the tile letter counts and point values, Butts manually tabulated how often each letter appeared in words across the front page of The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Saturday Evening Post, and a dictionary -- which is why common letters like E and A are worth only 1 point while rare ones like Q and Z are worth 10. Despite the game's careful design, Butts struggled for years to interest a publisher.

The breakthrough came in 1948, when Connecticut resident James Brunot bought the manufacturing rights, slightly rearranged the board's premium squares, simplified the rules, and renamed the game Scrabble.

Brunot's early production was modest and unprofitable -- only 2,400 sets were made in 1949, at a loss. That changed in 1952, when Selchow and Righter licensed the manufacturing rights; by 1954, nearly four million sets had been sold in a single year, cementing Scrabble as a mainstream fixture of American game nights, just two decades after Butts first tabulated letter frequencies by hand.

The 100-tile, 15x15 design that made the game a hit has stayed essentially fixed ever since, even as licensing has changed hands. Today Hasbro manufactures Scrabble in the United States and Canada, while Mattel holds the rights everywhere else, splitting production of the same core game worldwide -- a split that traces directly back to Brunot's original 1948 purchase of Butts's invention.