I can’t say I’ve ever been a huge lover of board games, but desperate times call for desperate measures. During the past 369 days of the pandemic, Grumpy and I have handled enough playing cards to not only build a house but a scale model of downtown Naperville.
The problem is Grumpy nearly always wins. He’s the one in the family with the mathematical brain, leaving me to be the wordsmith. Most of the time this works out fine, but we’re both pretty competitive so it has its challenges.
I thought I had the answer when our kids asked what we would like for Christmas. After months of losing at cards it was time to come up with another game.
“‘We’d like something that is easy enough to play casually in front of the TV for an evening but challenging enough to stop our aging brains turning to mush,'” I said. “‘How about Scrabble? That would be lovely (each letter adding up to a score of a nine) or better still exquisite (25 or 75 with a triple word score).'”
The children really came through for me, I mean us. They sent us a deluxe wooden set on a turntable that not only is phenomenal (19) to play with but looks simply tantalizing (gotta love those Z words. Score 20).
I hadn’t played Scrabble for years. My late mother loved it and we’d often play together so it brought back some happy reminiscences because they score more than memories. I couldn’t wait to play against Grumpy. I’d show him what it means to be married to a writer, although to be fair he’s been suffering the effects of that for 40 years.
Until our first game together, it hadn’t occurred to me that Scrabble is actually a numbers game. I knew each letter had a value which could be doubled depending on where you place it on the board. I knew there were a few places to triple your entire word score, but for me it had always been about using up as many letters as possible each turn. Turns out that assault only scores a measly seven points, whereas a carefully placed quartz could pick up 72!
Although neither of us can play chess, Grumpy takes as long to come up with a word as any master. For those of you who’ve watched “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix, I swear he waits to see letters coming down from the ceiling before placing his tiles. To date we’ve played 62 games and I’ve not won once!
So, now I’ve got a new hobby. While he’s at work I’m searching online dictionaries for obscure two letter words to improve my game. Just so you know ‘xu’, ‘aa’, ‘de’ and ‘os’ are acceptable, even though I have no idea what they mean. The only problem is trying to remember them all while seething that your opponent has just received a 50-point bonus for using all his letters.
Discovering (18 points) or should I say realizing (also 18 points so I guess it doesn’t matter) that I needed some serious help, I looked for some obscure words that would help me to beat Grumpy at his own game. I learned that Fakeer, a Muslim or Hindu monk, can also be spelled Faqir. In the unlikely event I ever find these letters on my tile rack, they would net 13 points. More importantly it’s one of the few words where the letter Q isn’t followed by a U.
Bezique is another good one if you do happen to have a spare U. Although it sounds like it should be a Caribbean island, it is in fact a card game favored by Winston Churchill. If I ever use it, I might keep the definition to myself so Grumpy doesn’t want to start beating me at that too. Since Z and Q each score 10 that could net you a massive 104 points if you a) were the first to play (double your score) and b) used all seven letters as you receive a 50-point bonus for that.
Just because Grumpy is hoping to qualify (22 points) for Scrabble’s Team U.S.A., it doesn’t mean he’s a great speller. He often, sorry, frequently (44 points on a double word score) asks me how a word is spelled before laying down his tiles.
For a while I answered without thinking but then realized that not only was he beating me, but I was enabling his behavior! This means that if he does spell a word incorrectly I can challenge it, meaning he misses a turn. Sadly, even that hasn’t helped me win yet, but I live in hope because I’m sanguine. Just so you know, since players have a maximum of seven letters to play with, technically you can’t use this word. However, if sang happens to be on the board already, you can add the other letters.
I admit (eight points) so make that confess (12 points) I have considered cheating. When you Google “obscure Scrabble words” it seems virtually every combination of letters is permissible. Stuck with an J and a Y at the end of the game? Simply stick it next to an X and you have XYJ.
Now you and I know this isn’t a real word, but with a little bit of acting skill I bet I could pull it off.
Grumpy: “Sizigg? That can’t be a real word.”
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Me: “What, you’ve never heard of it? By the way it’s actually pronounced Sidg. It’s a kind of Chinese porridge. Now if you want to risk missing a turn and challenge me, you can look it up, but….”
Hilary Decent is a freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007.