Bonus Points

 

I have a confession:

I am a Scrabble nerd.

Blame my paternal grandmother and her gold-plated Scrabble board if you must (and really, we must) because as of tonight I feel as if I have entered a new level of word nerdiness: The realm of 400+ scores and googling your closest Scrabble club to check how much money I can win off the old buggers (the only type of buggers that frequent Scrabble clubs it seems) if I turn professional.

In my defence I don’t earn much right now and those over 50s are just playing for kicks.

If I’m in this, I’m in it for the money.

Tonight, my Mother and I sat down for what we thought was going to be a nice, ordinary after-dinner board game. I have never denied being competitive, and judging by the number of trophies that have accumulated in this house, neither has anyone else under this roof.

Despite the relaxed situation, what followed can only be described as a massacre unlike any seen at the Page dining table before.

Before I break it down for you, it must be said that I am no stranger to the power of the Scrabble board. Self-assured boyfriends have been humiliated at my hands; others became hopelessly enchanted by my wordplay prowess. Oh yes, boys and girls, used correctly, Scrabble is far more than a meal replacement for the social life of middle-aged people. It is an egotistical academic gauntlet — best played with a nice cup of tea and a few chocolate biscuits.

In an unexpected preliminary move, I brought out the vintage Scrabble set this particular evening instead of the whizz-bang-deluxe dark green set complete with matching cheat’s dictionary. Mum later claimed that this was the beginning of her downfall — I say let the tiles lay where they fall.

I started.

12.

Hardly auspicious.

My grandmothers’ guiding rule echoed in my head: if you can’t score more than 10, trade your letters in.

She never followed this rule particularly well herself, but it has worked for me so far.

Mum and I traded words.

She scored 11, I put down a word for 33.

I had all the good letters. The Z, the Q, the J and both blanks.

Not winning was not an option for fear of losing face. I dangerously opted to use my U without the Q in a risky move that had potential to break the game open…

and then, after Mum’s go…it happened.

The best single play of a single letter in the history of Scrabble.

No really. I googled this.

One letter used.

62 points.

Legitimate.

Ok I didn’t do a lot of googling, but it’s definitely up there. Good luck finding the world record for highest score in Scrabble using just one letter. Wikipedia has nothing.

The words were Qi, both of them. The Q was on a triple-letter square. The crowd goes wild.

Mum wants to flip the table.

Nan calls out her condolences from the lounge room where Collingwood is getting flogged by Sydney.

Mum recovers from the shock to put down another word for 18 points.

It’s back to me and I sincerely apologise before putting down a 38 pointer. Mum grimaces. She’s beat, but she’s a trooper and comes back with a 30 point reply.

Now, in Scrabble, the best thing you can do (apart from slay the scoreboard with the aforementioned magical one letter play) is put down all your letters in one go. This is very tricky to do. There’s 7 letters, not much room on the board and they don’t all mash together nicely very often. Even if they do, you have to have somewhere to put this very long string of letters.

The first time I managed it, the word was PLEASURE. I kid you not. The second time was marred in controversy because we realised that I had put down a proper noun a few turns before. Boyfriend at the time was already smarting from the fact that I was undoubtedly going to be the first person to beat him, ever, but then we had a moral dilemma as to whether I had lost the game already because of the undiscovered error.

And people think Scrabble is just a board game…

Back to me turning professional.

The next word I put down used all my letters.

MEAGERLY

It seems so insufficient when I see it typed out like that, but I claimed 50 bonus points for my trouble.

I’ll spare you the rest of the gory details, but my final score was 424.

Mum’s was a respectable 259.

My point is, beside this being a very historic moment in my life (I’ve never reached 400 in Scrabble before) I have come to a cross roads.

Do I follow my passion for beating the pants off people at Scrabble and become a World Champion whilst ignoring the fact that I will have to regularly beat old people at something they can still enjoy for my dreams to come true?

Am I turning in to an old person prematurely?

Perhaps I can start an under-50s club.

Who’s with me?