Stone Soup by Jan Eliot for February 23, 2012

Oh this brings back memories. My two favorite games…that my family won’t play with me anymore. They decided years ago I am too ruthless! Totally identifying with Val on this! LOL LOL And Holly is in training, too…..Phil, you are TOAST :-D

I won’t play scrabble with my kids anymore. I play honest words like frame or metal or animal, then they play qi and get 35 points.

You’d think a cop could see a setup coming

I hope that they know of the usage of “Qatar” as a Q-word with no U for easy points.

Qi is a foreign language term, and Qatar is a Name. I thought neither was allowed in Scrabble®. I don’t know then rules because I have a huge vocabulary and noone would play Scrabble® with me twice.

If the kids weren’t there they could play strip Monopoly®.

That one child was mean to the nice man who brought spaghetti and meatballs instead of male. Send the kids to bed.

seriously, a board game of Scrabble? I play 20 games at once with people in 3 different countries on my Pad computer. :-D

Phil might have some surprise in store….

It’s a set up all right!

Oohh, this SHOULD be interesting.

Yeah, much better to do things in person. Seriously, Phil you got too relaxed around these sharks. Hee hee!

@Randy BAnd therein lies part of the problem with families today…having fun together.

And that is how the kids pay him back for feeding them well.

Real men can handle defeat and still love the women who win.

It’s the old double fake setup. In a contest between a guy who’s out and about all day, the children, one of them dedicated to remaining ignorant and the other real young, and a woman who spends hours each day talking to children, guess who wins the Scrabble game.

This is the moment when you realize the kids have accepted Mom’s boyfriend.

My parents played scrabble on their honeymoon… she clobbered him so badly they had to quit, as it wasn’t fun anymore.

Qi has quantities of qualities that make me question its qualifications, so quit.

Losing gracefully is a bonding opportunity.

As someone who plays too much online scrabble I can tell you that Qatar isn’t allowed, but qi and suq are despite both being foreign words.

Monopoly has got to hold some kind of a record for the game most likely to leave the players feeling bitter at the end. It used to be called the Landlord’s game and was supposed to illustrate the corruption of monopoly capitalism.

Monopoly is more fun though!

The “no foreign words” rule is a bit subjective. Concepts that are only known by their foreign name but have become commonplace in general usage are therefore permitted. That is what happened with the term chi/qi, due to the rise in popularity in the West of kungfu and taichi/taiqi. As for suq (also spelled souk), it followed bazaar (also once a foreign word) into the English language, although much more recently than the Persian loanword. Qatar, however, is undeniably a proper name, and is NOT allowed by Scrabble rules.

Weights and measures and monetary units are also considered fair game, as are the names of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet as well as the Greek alphabet. Hence, qoph.

BTW, don’t try to play “cemetary” in Scrabble. It is a misspelling.

I love the way Val is whistling.