farmdoc's blog post number 337

Sure I’ve played a bit of chess, draughts, chinese checkers, Boggle, Pictionary, Monopoly, and even the odd game of cards. I’ve found them okay, I guess, but I’ve never become an aficionado of any of them. Probably the table game that’s stirred my juices most is Scrabble. Even though Scrabble’s my favourite, and I can’t remember when I last played it, it still fascinates me. So I avidly read Judith Thurman’s 6-page article titled ‘Spreading the Word’, in the New Yorker last 19 January. She writes of the 2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament, the Scrabble competition subculture and a book (Word Freak) about it, a Scrabble computer program (‘Quackle’), a ‘bingo’ (i.e. emptying ones’s rack by using all seven tiles), the bingo of a lifetime (‘bar[o]ques’, worth 311 points), Scrabble-playing celebrities, the word exercise routines of champions, online Scrabble, Scrabble in book and film plots, and speed Scrabble. Scrabble was first sold in 1948, its heyday was in the early 1950s, and a renaissance’s happening now, with 1-2M sets sold yearly, and 30,000 new games starting each hour worldwide. It’s made in 29 languages and in Braille. Will I play Scrabble in future? Probably not. During the Big Apple Tournament, the Quackle inventor said it ‘thinks almost like a human, which can’t be said of everyone here’. There’s the rub.