Good Game

I do. Our family grew up playing games and I still love them. I remember as a youth asking my mom to play a game with me because none of my four siblings would, and she would agree as long as it was Scrabble. I would always sigh, wishing she would go for Monopoly or Life, but would then agree to Scrabble. I was so desperate for "the game." Now I am thankful to my mom's more narrow interest in the game arena, because playing Scrabble has helped me learn my words. Though these skills come in handy for really no other reason than to take people on in Scrabble, I'm learning words just the same.

We were always impressed when Wendy's friend, Robyn B., would come over and kill us all in Scrabble. They were REALLY good in that family.

Ray has been my latest victim. When I met him, I learned that his family was big into Scrabble. That's when I knew I was in--I would even play with them without Ray! They are all really good too. They play "open dictionary" style in order to learn words, which is nice, though it does make for a long game. Nonetheless, Ray and I have adopted the "open dictionary" style ourselves.

Ray is better at the game than I would like him to be, and beats me more than half the time. That's OK--it doesn't make me want to quit playing. I've found that staying home and caring for these foster babies has increased my interest for more mind-taxing activities in the evenings. Besides that, its cold and dark outside. Thankfully Ray has been willing to humor me.

Here is the start of our game board tonight. It made for a tougher game later on because we had nowhere to build on!


And later...note our "2-letter words" cheat sheet at the bottom of the photo.

The finished board. Ray won, of course.

Go to this link if you need word lists for your Scrabble playing. Lists like: words with J, X and Z, 3-letter words, words containing 66% or more vowels, Q words without U, etc. They're very helpful!

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/adam.bozon/scrabblelists.htm