How do you know if someone is an absolute Scrabble geek?
It’s easy. They say they want to play in the first place.
And how do you know if they are good or not?
This is also easy. They say they want to play in the first place, and they feign humility regarding their skills.
My friends, Marie and Mercedes, love Scrabble, and they are good! We have officially established a Tuesday ritual of tea and this classic word game, and I have to mention that at first, we were polite.
The conversation went like this:
Michelle: So, for this first round, we don’t necessarily need to keep score. We can just play for fun.
Marie: Well, ok. I mean, I’m not really a competitive person.
Michelle: Oh, me neither.
Here’s where Marie and I were totally lying to one another. Both of us went to Catholic school, where, if truth be told, there is an absolute breeding ground for (mostly healthy) competitive behavior. In Catholic school, you will not find the “feel-good-everybody wins-yay!” philosophy. Nope. When you grow up with games like Red Rover, Dodge Ball, and King of the Mountain, you learn… it’s do or die, and you push yourself to be the best you can be.
Marie and I tried this happy approach to Scrabble for our first game, but we were both mentally keeping score. At one point, Marie put down a great word, and she had the honesty to finally say, “Well, if we were keeping score that would have been a good one. I mean triple word score and everything.” Heh heh.
I had to laugh. Marie was a Scrabble player with strategy on the brain. She knew to add an ‘s’ to make something plural, and then build from there with a word beginning with ‘s’ to increase her score. Mercedes knew words that I had never heard of like: ‘kiter,’ ‘mos,’ and ‘qua.’ Both ladies knew not to set up opponents in positions where they could get the coveted double and triple word scores. For the second game, we did keep score, and it was neck-in-neck until the very end. So much fun!
The best part of the night was when Marie suggested that next time, instead of tea, that maybe we could drink vodka lemonades. Mercedes and I couldn’t have agreed with her more.
