TV Scrabble screen and stylus and the tiles would fly out of the podiums onto a giant upright Scrabble board. Contestants scored points for the word they made but only the higher scoring word remained on the board to be played off for the next go. This would be played four or five times. The second round was Speed Scrabble. Each player was given a clean board and had just one minute to formulate as many words and score as high as they can. They would take their minutes in turn. The winner of the first game would do battle with the
Scrabble CH in the "Collins Scrabble Words" lexicon. In 1938, American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented called "Lexiko". The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including "The New York Times". The new game, which he called "Criss-Crosswords," added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style game play. He manufactured a few sets himself, but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day.