Scrabble

• Thu, 09:24: Scrabble should have an option for "You can play that because if ZYX was a real word, then that would be a killer play."
• Thu, 09:27: Hey scrabble, did you leave "zen" out of the official scrabble dictionary as some form of irony?

I'm totally hooked on Scrabble on the eyephone. I've always liked it, but as a board game it had the potential to be a living hell.

1) My opponent doesn't move fast enough and I nod off.
2) I don't move fast enough and my opponent keeps bugging me to move.
3) The cat attacks the board and letters go everyplace and this facilitates a need to start over, which neither of you want to do.
4) Your 400 year old Funk & Wagnall's doesn't have "Muslim" in it, but it does have "Mohammadian" so you lose the challenge.
5) You start at 6 PM and at 10:30 the bag is still full of letters and it's sort of a grim you-move-I-move until one of you cracks wide open and runs off. (Growing up, breaking your opponent's will like this was how I thought you *won* at Scrabble. The numbers on the tiles are just a red herring.)

It's simply that Scrabble was not meant to be the type of game where you and your brother play for an afternoon. It was clearly meant to be played like chess, where you carefully contemplate your moves over time. The phone lets you do this, preserving your game with no possibility of cat-ter-ference.

This is all solved by Scrabble on your electronic device. Slow opponents are overcome by having multiple games going. (Let them take their time! I am the Scrabble version of Garry Kasparov.) My own slow moves are not as important to the other player because they can text someone about something different or watch the video of the penguin chasing a butterfly or switch over to plants vs zombies or something. The whole challenge thing is out the window because there is a common dictionary that the computer chooses for you and it simply won't allow you to play an invalid word.

Of course this has its own problems. It leads to random plugging in of letters in an attempt to see if they go thru. Your opponent can't see you making these attempts, and you can make as many as you like without penalty. Because of this I have learned that 'QI','XI','XU','ZA','KI', and 'HM' are all playable words that have no other meaning to me than "This two letter word can get you bigtime points in Scrabble."

In real life, "Ka" and "Qi" have exactly the same definition; "The vital force in Chinese thought" which tends to make me want to text back "The vital force in chinese thought" as the definition of any odd word that I play in scrabble that is challenged:

"Dude, what's a 'QUA'?"

"The vital force in Chinese thought."

"I thought that was 'KI'"

"It has multiple spellings."

(If anyone wants to play scrabble (or words with friends) against me, I am user steffanz at teatree at gmail dot com on both of them.)