Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for April 28, 2024

My brother could control the dice. Honest. He NEVER landed on my Monopoly properties… and he could run “Can’t Stop” in one turn. (Wikipedia has an article about the game). So we preferred to play scrabble with him. He, of course, preferred not.

This reminded me of playing Scrabble with my daughter. We read together a lot so she had a great vocabulary, even in the early grammar school years, so she at some point started to beat me routinely. (Today, she’s a middle school English teacher.)

I remember the first time I was able to beat my father at Scrabble. I was so proud of myself. Until a few years later when I realized it was because he had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Then I was sad about it.

If it’s along an edge instead of from the start square, she’d hit TWO triples and get NINE TIMES the tile score, not three.

In school, several of the whiz kids (including myself) were playing Scrabble, and we had technical words like “omen” and “oxide” and one of the onlookers (also a whiz kid) looked at a particular word, and he looked at it, and he looked at it, and he looked at it, and finally he just blurted “WHAT’S ‘E-Y-E’???!!!”

Well, Joan IS a writer. And if I got a Scrabble hand with a Q and an X in it, I sure would think of the word Quixotic even if I didn’t have any of the other letters.

I used to try and play that words with friends. Even when I cheated and used the internet to help I always lost.

It seems that a lot of the time women are better at word games than men. I never play Scrabble but I did play it once against 3 men, my husband included and beat the stew out of all of them. Another word game I really like is Taboo. Once we played it with another couple, women against men and again the women cleaned up.

If you play Scrabble often enough, you will have a vowel movement.

This is why I don’t play Scrabble with my brothers. I can do better than rug or bat, but not much!

Ugh. I prefer Monopoly.

Yes, this is why my wife and I no longer play Scrabble. And, no, the one who got “quixotic” was NOT me. :-)

She needs to play the Scrabble computer where you decide what level you are at.

This reminds me of my MIL who regularly trounced the rest of us and one of us was a HS English teacher. The rest of us simply had college educations…loved that woman.

Washington Post has a version called OUTSPELL. I started with easy, then medium, now I’m at level 20 in Hard. It’s a good brain challenge for me.

Will they believe THAT? Or how about this?

After my sister left home, it was just my folks and me, and we played Boggle on Saturday nights because it was shorter than Scrabble. My mom said she played just to keep my dad and me from getting too competitive with one another. Yeah, my dad won about 50% of the time, I about 40% and my mom about 10% — or something like that. I was in late high school or early university, and it was a lot of fun.

I be like the guy’s discouraged. When I was a kid only game I think what my dad bought was checkers. I was introduced to scrambled against an elderly champ, yes she won. Me not that smart. Wally and nephew more my style.My family we do not even try scramble, we do not have the games. when my son was small it was tedious with only two players for even Sorry. Dad was working.

been there, done that

Husband does not play any board games – sigh.