What is "alfapet"

Alfapet used to be the Swedish name for the well-known word game Scrabble.

The Swedish board game company Alga introduced Alfapet in Sweden in 1954 and sold the game under that name for almost four decades. However, in the early 1990s Alga lost its licence to sell Scrabble in Sweden to Mattel, who started selling Scrabble with its original name. As it turned out, Alga had the right to the name Alfapet, and very soon constructed and marketed a different word game with the same name. Alfapet and other Alga products are now owned by the Swedish company BRIO.

The new Alfapet word game differs in several ways from Swedish Scrabble:

• The board has 17 x 17 squares (instead of 15 x 15).
• There are more bonus squares (even quadruples) and also reduction squares.
• There are 120 tiles (instead of 100) and the values differ from the Swedish Scrabble set.
• The letter Q has a separate tile (but can only be played with a blank tile in Scrabble).
• There are several rule differences.