Scrabble, as chronicled by Stefan Fatsis in his tome Word Freak, was the 1938 brainchild of Alfred Mosher Butts, who built his game off of a previous game he had invented called Lexiko. Scrabble was invented by a bored, unemployed man. And with many people out of work, there was more time to kill than ever. But unlike previous economic crashes, indoor lighting was more ubiquitous during the Great Depression and offered a boon to the indoor recreation world. Sort of a release from the tensions of everyday life.”īoard games in America date back to the earliest Native American communities and became more commercially marketed in the mid-19th century as Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers grew their respective businesses in Salem, Massachusetts. “The player can always say to himself, ‘I’m going to get the better of the other guy.’ People also can play Monopoly without it being the end of the world. It appeals to the competitive nature of people,” he said. The game not only provided cheap entertainment, it also offered a psychological elixir, as Parker said, it gave people “a feeling of wealth.” “But what kept it going is the chance for individual gain. So they stayed home and played Monopoly.”
Edward Parker, the grandnephew of the game company founder, George Parker, recalled years later, “During the Depression, people did not have enough money to go out to the shows.
