Life is a Game: The Sisters Scrabble Club

Each Sunday morning at 11 a.m., the Sisters Scrabble Club convenes at Paulina Springs Books. I’ve attended a few times, and while I’m not especially good at Scrabble, the games offer good company who play with infectious enthusiasm.

Though few men have attended so far, I always feel welcome.

Katie Lombardo founded the club early in her relationship with Lane Jacobson, owner of Paulina Springs, when they had to address a serious incompatibility: he doesn’t like Scrabble. Lane’s effort to indulge her and play the game not only “resulted in tears” (presumably his), but he actually dented his head hammering it in frustration against a table. I asked Katie what Lane offered her to offset such an attitude (what he brought to the table, so to speak, beyond a durable skull), and she said, “On the one hand he didn’t like Scrabble, but he had a bookstore, and he said if I formed a Scrabble club, I could host it here.”

Katie really loves Scrabble. She defends her ranking on the Internet Scrabble Club site (https://isc.ro/), where she plays three times a day, and Lane — no joke — had her Scrabble study sheet laminated so that she wouldn’t ruin it in the bath.

She says, “Scrabble holds a special place in my heart. As a child, I played countless games with my mom until I became too much of a challenge for her. My lifelong love of words — song lyrics, poetry, and quotations — has always inspired me. Plus, I love the competitive factor. Scrabble beautifully melds all these passions into one game.”

Since Scrabble ranks only mid-tier among games I enjoy, I wanted to understand both their extremes of sentiment. Lane told me, “Katie seems to feel similarly about my games that have 45-page rules.”

I asked how he’d compare it to poker, a game he’s expert at.

“I guess Scrabble does have aspects that resemble poker. At high levels of Scrabble play, you have to manage probabilities,” he said, addressing the fact that you anticipate putting together words like you do a hand, by calculating odds. “But,” he said, “the rules of the game are the game,” meaning that while there is strategy in blocking opponents and optimizing points, Scrabble requires extensive knowledge outside the core rules. There’s no reliable principle for deciding whether you can legally play a given word. To be really competitive, you have to memorize the official dictionary, or your club’s extensive house rules, or both. The number of game elements you learn and apply in poker is much smaller.

However, like me, Lane enjoys Magic: The Gathering, a game I discussed in my last column, where the best players acquaint themselves with a vast array of cards, many of which can be considered an exception to the general rules. It would be easier to memorize the Scrabble dictionary than the tens of thousands of Magic cards. While it’s true that a game of Magic involves only the cards currently being played, you typically don’t look at the cards in your opponent’s deck, so as far as you’re concerned, your opponent might be playing with any cards, just like your Scrabble opponents might use any word. What actually seems to set Scrabble apart from Magic is that Scrabble plays with the medium of daily communication, and Magic with fantasy elements and abstractions that don’t apply directly to the real world. Like poker, Magic comprises its own world and exercises your general strategy skills more than any practical knowledge.

I have an idea, weakly held, that Scrabble appeals to the same instinct as learning social trends. We use words to express ourselves; we use clothing and other fashions to express ourselves. To be good at Scrabble, you must follow not just English but the more meticulous Scrabble English to become skilled. Why are some foreign-language loan words accepted and others aren’t? Why has one acronym graduated to a Scrabble word when another hasn’t? Scrabble explores emerging social significance.

The game of socialization isn’t won through strategy and intimidation so much as understanding what’s proper, and discriminating cultured from uncultured. During one game I’d joined, a player asked if she could complete a high-scoring, perfectly legal synonym for “prostitute,” given it was a “coarse” word and so maybe not allowed by the house even if it was in the official dictionary. As it turned out, we’d all noticed the opportunity, and if I’d had the letters, I would have played it without qualm. Even though I have a degree in English and about three decades of editorial experience, I’m a mediocre player, and my lack of propriety might help explain why — I’m not quite as interested in customs as strategy … and, of course, impractical stories about monsters and heroes.

So I have these ideas about why Scrabble appeals to me just a bit, to Katie a lot, and to Lane not at all, but what about the other members? Club regular Janice Frew told me, “I like word games and games that aren’t as up to chance. The Scrabble draw bag is as much chance as I like in a game.”

Sandra Bianchi said, “While the players are good, they’re encouraging and not super-competitive. Everyone wants to do well, but the point is to have fun.”

In my last article, I introduced the concept of metagame, the game about the game, which is what elevates a casual game to a serious hobby. A player ranking system is a classic metagame element, and while the Sisters Scrabble Club isn’t that competitive, it does have a High-Word List where each member displays the current maximum points they’ve scored in a single play.

Barbara Haynes said that for her, the game offers “great mental gymnastics.” She plays computer word games, but unlike Katie, not socially, nor does she participate in a metagame outside the club. For example, she plays Wordle, but doesn’t share her score, and when she plays Words with Friends, she plays against the computer, not with friends. Mental exercise is what most attracts her to word games.

Nancy Loring shared this attitude. “I’m 89, and Scrabble is supposed to stimulate your brain,” she said. I’d say it’s working: she crushed my score in a single play, laying down the word “DOZEN” with a wild-card tile on a 3x word multiplier, for 45 points and a new High-Word entry!

While sharing the sentiments of the other club members, Diane Mayer has also embraced the metagame, notably with good-natured trash talk: “When I run into the other members in town, I’ll say, ‘I’m really gonna cream Katie.’ I love being a word nerd.”