NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine (23 October 2014) — A week into the Great Scrabble Freeze-Out of 2014, I’m left to contemplate my roots in the game. There has always been Scrabble, of course. But the new, smartphone-enabled incarnation of my Scrabble journey started in the Dominican Republic back in January 2013.
Jeff Wallach turned me on to this smartphone-enabled version of the game during a media junket to Casa de Campo, in the Dominican Republic. I noticed he was playing on his phone, a Facebook incarnation of Scrabble pimped via some Hasbro app. When I inquired, there was a guarded, secret-society “Can you handle the truth?” aspect to Jeff’s responses. In the end, I was deemed worthy. I’ve played some 350 games vs. Jeff and a dozen different opponents since.
We’ve all played Scrabble through the years, perhaps after an introduction from our parents. That’s my story. But this game never proved some rudimentary Candyland-type diversion, or a lame exercise sexed up by three-dimensional playing surfaces (The Game of Life). It never required physical skill (Jenga) any wellsprings of trivial knowledge.
Scrabble was and remains utterly singular and vital: strategic word-smithing in the language soup we’ve all slurped since birth.
This essay was long time in coming. I write it now because the mobile app that enables smartphone Scrabble has been unable to connect with Facebook for almost a week. Web alerts tell us developers are on the case. Until they solve the problem, short of going on the laptop and playing there (a place I do NOT wish to go), I’m stymied — and so are my half-dozen current opponents. I texted one yesterday: “Life has so little meaning without Scrabble.”
“I feel rudderless,” he responded. Immediately.