The Addiction and Teacher That is Speed Scrabble

Thanks to a scarring game of Risk ("Ukraine is not weak!!") back in 2000 I tend to avoid board games; the exception, of course, being the occasional game of Mah-Jongg. Who doesn't want to place vital organs as collateral for a $10,000 bet every once in a while, am I right?? Anyway, regardless of my professed dislike for board games, I have recently become addicted to Speed Scrabble.

What's Speed Scrabble, you ask?

Speed Scrabble (SS) is to nerdy board-gamers what cocaine was to 80s celebrities: It is fast-paced, exhilarating, addictive, and the source of numerous unnatural nosebleeds. In the case of SS, the reason is either because the game got so intense participants came to fisticuffs, or the breakneck pace and overexertion from the game melted their brains. (***If you're bored enough to read the rules, I will put those at the bottom***)

Let's just leave the Speed Scrabble-Cocaine analogy there.

One friend, whom I will anonymize, put it this way:

This is utterly ridiculous to admit, but I dreamed about Speed Scrabble last night. I actually awoke to myself arranging words beginning with "q". Kinda weird.

Lessons Learned

SS has even taught me some valuable life lessons. The two that come most readily to mind are "pride cometh before the fall" and "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

Let me share a story that illustrates both. In the first game of what would become a 3-hour SS marathon, I came storming out of the blocks -- jumping out to a quick lead and catching my opponents at unawares. I foolishly declared:

"I guess you could call that my Pearl Harbor."

I guess it seemed like an apt analogy at the time, what with the quick strike and my Japanese heritage and all. For all of you not familiar with the Pacific Theater of WW2, however, here's the major problem with my poorly thought-out analogy: Japan LOST WW2! It was decimated!! Japan may have "won" Pearl Harbor, but even Admiral Yamamoto said afterward: "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping tiger." And he wasn't talking those pansy circus tigers that jump through hoops. He was talking the mean ones that want to tear your limbs off and eat you (avid PETA supporters being no exception). Pearl Harbor was really just the beginning of the end for Japan.

And so it was with me; my initial victory accomplished very little except to "awaken the tiger" (read: gave Mitch a reason to shut my gloating mouth up and decisively trounce me and everyone else under her feet). It became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I doomed myself to suffer the same fate as the Empire did in WW2 because I declared victory too soon.

So, chalk one History Comparison FAIL for me. Sigh.


***Speed Scrabble Explained***
You lay all of the scrabble tiles facedown in the middle of the table, everyone takes seven, then tries to build their own set of words as quickly as possible, using all tiles. Once they have used the seven tiles in their own hand, they say "go" and everyone draws two from the pile and so on until all the tiles are used up. Then you count up points based on the points on each tile, subtracting points for the tiles left over.