MAKE MONEY

Scrabble

By Tom Parker

Sometimes it costs more to buy it than to make it from the money itself.

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Photograph by Tom Parker

$14.95 Scrabble game from Hasbro.

Invented by architect Alfred Butts in 1938, the popular board game Scrabble is now sold in 121 countries, with an estimated 150 million sets in use worldwide. The basic version sold by Hasbro Inc. for $14.95 consists of a game board marked with a 15-by-15 grid and 100 tiles, 98 of which are marked with a letter and a point value ranging from 1 to 10.

For my MAKE Money version of Scrabble, I used 100 pre-1982 pennies (exactly a B3U1C3K5!) made of 95% copper. Using a ¾" Forstner “web-foot” ...

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