A Blog Post about Scrabble

by Lindsay S.

In Scrabble, each letter has an assigned value. Z’s and Q’s are worth ten points, blanks are worth none, and each of the remaining ninety- six tiles holds a numerical value somewhere in between. But the number of points for which each letter accounts during an actual game depends almost entirely on the skill of its player. A J tile, for example, is worth only eight points off the board. However, when used to its fullest potential, when placed strategically over one of twelve coveted “triple letter scores,” bridging two separate words, the J alone can add forty-eight to a player's score. To Scrabble enthusiasts everywhere, this uncommon consonant is absolutely invaluable.

The game of Scrabble, much like each of its individual playing pieces, holds varying degrees of value among its wide range of players. For some, the game is nothing more than a fancy crossword puzzle, a burgundy, cardboard box gathering dust in the back of the game closet. To others, Scrabble’s combination of luck and skill, mathematics and language, prompt the game to take on an educational, or even scientific role. Scrabble, for most casual players, serves as a means of connection with a certain person or a certain group of people: an opportunity to spend an hour or two with a distant relatives or some time online with a faraway friend. To a select few, however, the word "Scrabble" means something entirely different. For all those who have ever enrolled in a formal tournament, the 100 wooden tiles and 225 off-white squares of a Scrabble board take on a hugely competitive connotation: What for many is simply a leisure activity, for them becomes a series of complicated rules, books upon books of strategy and vocabulary, and a group of Scrabble-obsessed peers, all of whom view the game through the same serious eyes.

Longtime Scrabble aficionado and blogger, Justin, describes the board game as the closest thing he has ever found to religion. He cites The Official Scrabble Players' Dictionary as his sect's Holy book and describes the game itself as "a way of life." He then dives into a jumble of complex Scrabble jargon, comparing the memorization of seven and eight letter words to Buddhist enlightenment.

I can imagine Justin, sitting alone in a cramped apartment or a tiny coffee shop, devouring a copy of Stephan Fatsis’s Scrabble memoir, Word freak, or blogging, as he does intermittently, about the intricacies of the game. I can see him devotedly studying his two’s and three’s and committing to memory hundreds of almost useless words like “fe” and “qat.” He memorizes their point-values, rather than their meanings. His life, on and off the Scrabble board, is an endless search for the next triple word score.

I can also imagine, or rather I can remember, games of Scrabble with my friends and family devoid of rules almost entirely. I remember a game on the roof with my best friend that lasted three hours, because we stopped in the middle to talk about boys and listen to Death Cab for Cutie. I remember a game with my parents in which my father confidently bet my mother $50 that “Disney” was in the Scrabble dictionary (It wasn’t). I remember all the illegitimate proper nouns I’ve let slide or put on the Scrabble board myself, just because at the time they were so funny, and I can also recall the first Scrabble game I ever studied for, just so I could beat my best friends mom, who got forty points for “yak” once and never stopped bragging.

After that game, I joined the National Scrabble Association. I waited anxiously for my list of two’s and three’s to come in the mail, and I scoured the tournament dates section of the Scrabble newspaper for a competition to which I could easily drive myself. I raised my score to 425, and I checked out Word freak from the Palos Verdes Public Library. But I stopped reading half way…And I never found a tournament. I was missing a certain something that all competitive Scrabblers posses.

My issue, I suppose, is that to me acceptance into ( or “conversion to” to pun on Justin’s blog) the Scrabble culture is far from worth the incredible amount of work necessary to succeed in the Scrabble world . Is a national Scrabble ranking worth the game's taking over a person’s life and thoughts? Is the addition of competition worth the elimination, in some ways, of fun? Because when the game ends, when each player subtracts the value of his leftover letters from his final score and slides his used squares back into their officially licensed Scrabble letter pouch, when he takes his tiles off the board, isn't the J only worth eight points? Is the J even worth anything at all?