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I'm a loser, baby...

I am officially hanging my head in shame.

I'm supposed to be the word person! I'm the one who loved diagramming sentences and taking spelling tests in junior high. I'm the one who took two English classes and served as the literature teacher's aide during my junior year of high school. I graduated with a degree in communication, an emphasis on print journalism. I'm a word geek, a proofreading fool.

And yet I just lost my second online game of Scrabulous, a Facebook application similar to Scrabble. I lost. To my husband. The picture taker.

This last game, he didn't just beat me. He slaughtered. He took no prisoners. He opened the old can o' whupass. I'm pretty sure he smoked me by at least a hundred points. I just went back to survey the carnage, but the game board disappeared after his nuking was complete. Just as well. I don't really need the evidence of the annihilation available for all to see.

I guess we should give a shout out to his alma maters -- Grinnell and Mizzou's J-school must be edumacating them right. Maybe we should cut ME some slack and say that the luck of the tiles has just not been with me lately.

If you'd like to kick my butt with triple word scores and all sorts of Scrabble rabble, look me up on Facebook and challenge me to a match.

Meantime, here's a little Scrabble trivia to get you in the mood:

The highest score obtainable by playing a seven-letter word is QUARTZY (164 points) across a triple-word-score square with the Z on a double-letter-score square.

Scrabble is a real word. It means "to scratch frantically."

Scrabble sets are found in one out of every three American homes.

The game is sold in 121 countries in 29 different languages.

In America and Canada, when a player empties his rack on one play, it's called a "bingo." Elsewhere, it's called a "bonus." The player gets 50 additional points.


In researching this lovely little post, learned that Scrabble's makers, Hasbro and Mattel, have been throwing cease-and-desist orders around like candy at a parade. It seems the inventors of Scrabulous didn't exactly ask permission when they blatantly copied America's favorite word game for their own purposes. Now Hasbro and Electric Arts have announced that they will team up for an official Scrabble game on Facebook later this month. There's definitely enough players to go 'round. This story says about 450,000 people play Scrabulous on Facebook each day.

I guess that could mean that 225,000 people just like me LOSE each day.

It's nice to know I'm not alone in my misery, despair and self-loathing.

Edited to note: Well I'll be damned. This isn't a major revelation. It seems I have frequently and for long periods of time thoroughly sucked at Scrabble. Either that, or Tim is an extraordinary genius.

Comments

Ted Remington said…
Don't worry, Amy. I'm another alleged word guru who often loses in Scrabble. I've figured out I spend too much time thinking up cool words without concentrating on actual game play (e.g., using double/triple score boxes; playing defensively so as not to allow my opponents easy points; etc.). Knowing semi-obscure words helps, but that's only a small part of the game.

Feel free to challenge me anytime, and we can have a loser-bowl game of Scrabble!

ted
Brianne said…
If you want to feel good about yourself, challenge me to a game of Scrabulous. You will probably win. Also a word geek, I lose to BRETT - the science nerd. But I did once beat his sister Jill, who is a librarian and also uber word geek. :)

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