Giant retro board game
By James Grahame
Bohus is set to unleash a piece about VCR-based board games sometime this week, so I'll warm up the audience with a look at Stephen Reed's massive Scrabble set. This whimsical installation lives in the London offices of Bloomberg Financial Services. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the analysts to discover they didn't have sufficient space to spell "arbitrage" for a 3X letter score.
The game was invented by an out of work architect named Alfred Butts during the Great Depression. The name Scrabble ("to grope frantically") was trademarked in 1948, but the game didn't achieve runaway success until the early 1950s. Millions of scrabble sets have been produced since, facilitating billions of misspelled werds.
