Malays (ethnic group)
The Malays also have a variant of Mancala board game known as Congkak. The game is played by moving stones, marbles, beads or shells around a wooden board consisting of twelve or more holes. Mancala is acknowledged as the oldest game in the world and can be traced its origin since Ancient Egypt.
As the game dispersed around the globe, every culture has invented its own variation including the Malays.
Lexiko
In 1931, Butts wrote a paper entitled "Study of Games." In his paper, he described three categories of games: board, number games using playing cards or dice, and letter games (or games that fell into more than one). He noted that, although the most popular games were of the first two (e.g. Chess and Backgammon), the best letter game readily available was Anagrams. Around that time, he was reading "The Gold Bug" by Edgar Allan Poe and noticed a line containing the English letter distribution. This gave him an epiphany: Anagrams would be more fun if the most common letters in English were more common in the game. He carefully analyzed letter frequencies in newspapers and other printed works to determine the ideal letter distribution for the game. With a few other changes, he named his project "Lexiko". The game design was rejected by games manufacturers such as Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley, but Butts was able to sell copies on his own, though not enough to recoup his development expenses. In 1938, he began work on a board game based on "Lexiko", which he called "Criss-Cross Words", which was eventually renamed "Scrabble".