Subject: RE: scrabble

From: "Fatsis, Stefan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 14:33:22 -0400

Hi Graham

Good to hear from you. Fascinating stuff your work on games history and
software. Thanks for all the links (and thanks for the nice words about
``Word Freak'').

I believe I've solved the Wordy question (and perhaps saved old Alfred's
reputation). I called Pressman and they emailed me the catalogue pages for
the game. The first was indeed in 1938, but as you'll see it's a totally
different game, a card game. The second, published in 1953, is the Scrabble
ripoff. I've attached the catalogue pages.

Best wishes and good luck in all your endeavours. And thanks again for
maintaining the letter-games archive.

Stefan

-----Original Message-----
From: Graham Toal [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 10:54 PM
To: Fatsis, Stefan
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: scrabble

> > Someone  on CGP, the competitive Scrabble players chat list, just posted
> > the link to your amazing letter-game history Web site. I wish I'd found
it

I'm not on that list though I am on crossword-games-analysis and the
two UK lists. I lurk on them just to pick up their game analysis because
I write computer versions of Scrabble and I have some hope that some
day I'll have the free time to put some real work into it and write a
competitive scrabble program.  (Competition in the software side isn't
quite as intense as the real-life game, but the people are just as
.... shall we say ... 'interesting')

> > Anyway, as I said, I have no proof one way or another, and at the time I
> > wrote the book (it was published in hardcover in 2001) I didn't have
much
> > information about Wordy -- not enough, anyway, to include it in my
> > description of the history of Scrabble. My guess is that Butts certainly
> > saw a bunch of earlier word games, like Lexicon and Cross-O-Grams, but I
> > think the inspiration for and technical superiority of what became
> > Scrabble were his and his alone.

I tend to agree, but the theory was plausible and no-one else had
suggested it before so I thought I should put it up for discussion.
I did try to contact Pressman's - there was a family member still in
charge when I last checked - but never got a reply.  Maybe you would
have more luck?  If you look at all the similar old games on my page
you'll see that there was a wholly different attitude to copying other
company's products back then and it is far from unthinkable in the
context of the time.

> > Thanks for your terrific research. So how and why did you get interested
> > in compiling the page?

Actually the inspiration for it was, surprisingly, the aggressive posturing
by Hasbro's lawyers.  They had closed down so many Scrabble sites
and public domain implementations of Scrabble, that I thought that if I
put up the details of some of the older out-of-copyright games that were
similar, the programmers who had had their games removed could re-target
them for similar but non-contentious games.  As it turns out, not many of
them have; Scrabble has such a draw that everyone still writes Scrabble
games, and no-one writes "Wordy" games.

If you haven't already seen it, have a look at my other Scrabble page,
which is the one I have for software:
http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/scrabble.html
That's actually my "real" page which I started first.  Then I found
Steffan O'Sullivan's page of word games
(http://www.panix.com/~sos/bc/wordgame.html), which he had lost interest
in updating, and offered to take it off his hands.  Every few months
I scan eBay and the net, and add anything new that pops up.  It's
grown quite large!  It's not actually very hard work to keep up
because there are few new games, and I've already got pretty good
coverage of the old ones.  I did at one point start buying them on
eBay in order to document them better with half an eye to writing
a reference book but decided that was too expensive!  So what's on
the web page is useful but not as well researched as it could be.

I also have some rather interesting pages on foreign language scrabble
which aren't very well known but I'm rather pleased with them nevertheless.
http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/details/ - I have most of the foreign
sets and several of the photos in the pages are games I've played
myself.  I recently played my first game of Scrabble in Spanish
against a Gameboy Advance handheld - I wrote the game down and need to
set it up on a table soon to add to the Spanish page...

One last page you may find useful - some images I've picked up over the
years which will eventually be attached to the page with the game
descriptions: http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/images-private/ - warning,
this page is *big*!

I used to work at an ISP and had my home server on a 1.5Mb DSL line.
When I changed jobs recently I lost the free connection, so I'm afraid
it's much slower now and not 100% reliable.  If the images don't all
load, try it again later.

regards

Graham