Enjoyed Meg Wolitzer’s NYT essay yesterday about how she enjoys Scrabble online with
Trissie is winning...
strangers. She imagines the player in NZ eating vegemite, the opponent in Galveston living in a trailer park with a guitar standing against the wall. But aside from the most basic of pleasantries, “n1” (nice one), and “wp” (well played) she likes the anonymity.
Takes all kinds for the world to orbit, I guess.
For the bike trip I brought along Bananagrams, Big Boggle, and, of course, Scrabble.
The more impressive since I managed with just carry-on luggage (which included my own bike helmet). We had a group game of Bananagrams on Trissie and Christine’s coffee table at Vichy Hot Springs. Guides Nate and Brad joined in and were mighty impressive, though it was totally unfair for Nate and Nancy to play as a team.
A couple of Boggle hands at a lunchtime picnic area enroute to the lost coast.
But the Mother word game is Scrabble.
There might have been curiosity about why Trissie and I wanted to sit next to each other on the van. The picture above should satisfy that. Trissie is an incredibly good player….she led one game with “squire” and then a couple turns later added an E at the front to make it a triple word score…PTSD has clearly allowed me to block out that ridiculously high score.
Knowing that Trissie is good makes it a different kind of game. When I play Words with Friends with my mother on the phone things are are more casual. We generally have four or five games going at once and sometimes the conversation we have on that chat feature is more important than the game. She tries to read my mood by how well I play.
When Jessamyn, Ariel, and I played Scrabble a couple years ago at Canyon Ranch we didn’t even keep score and freely helped each other come up with better plays. We had a grand time.
To me it’s not really the game that is fun–although it is–but interacting…okay, playing…with people I enjoy and care about.
