TABLETOP TIME MACHINE
Following the success of Scrabble in the 1930s (invented by Alfred Butts) and1940s (developed by James Brunot) you mightn’t have thought anyone would have the audacity to challenge it with another crossword game involving the placement of letter tiles on a squared grid. Yet this is exactly what Elliott Rudell did in the early 1980s. He named his brainchild Upwords because it enables you to build words not only from left to right and from top to bottom, but also in the third dimension from ground level upwards. In brief, you can change words by piling letter tiles an top of one another. For example, you can change NOVEL to HOVEL, or NAVEL, or NOMAD. Or you can build and extend it to make, for example, ENAMEL or INNOVATE
— or even, with AIINNOT in you rack, INNOVATION, thereby gaining a bonus
(albeit a miserly one) for using all seven tiles.
Another appealing feature of Upwords is that the letters do not have separate values, so the tiles are not cluttered up with distracting numbers. Instead, every word you make scores one point for each tile it contains. So, for example, a five-letter word with two tiles in each position scores ten, but if every letter tops a pile of five, the maximum allowed, then it scores 25 points. There are the usual expected bonuses for placing ‘difficult’ letters like J, V, X, Z and Qu (a nice touch, that conjoined ‘u’) and using all seven tiles in your rack.
Rudell invented the Upwards in 1982, using modified pieces of equipment from a game then published under the name Chinese Chess. The publisher Milton Bradley immediately expressed interest, but reported a tendency of players to keep building upwards to such an extent that the game became physically unstable and failed to develop properly in the basic two dimensions.
Rudell countered this by the simple device of limiting stacks to five tiles and awarding double points to words entirely at ground level. In this form it took off with such success that, in true Californian tradition, the inventor adopted UPWORDS as his personalized car number-plate. The game was less successful on the UK market and was withdrawn after a few years. However, 1995 saw its relaunch in the 10x10 form developed in house by Hasbro UK, which gave it a new lease of life.
The 10x10 version certainly improved on the smaller original. Whereas the 8x8 game tended to clog up rapidly, leaving much of the board blank and unreachable, the enlargement enables a good spread of ground-level words to be initiated, thus opening up many more opportunities for upward building. However, one or two of the original rules have been revised, especially as regards the scoring, though I’m not convinced that all are for the better.
Rudell sent me the following fascinating series of family connections: ‘‘Alfred Butts invented Scrabble. Alan Turoff invented Boggle. I invented Upwords. Alfred Butts’s nephew baby-sat Alan Turoff. My first job in the toy industry had me working in the office next to Caroline Poole, who subsequently married Alan Turoff.” It’s a small world, even in the USA.