I don’t like playing Scrabble anymore…

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Several years ago Scrabble was a favourite pastime for me, my husband and I played it together and visitors often joined us in a game. It was fun and providing a dictionary was at hand to check a word or a dubious spelling there was no disagreement and the best man won. This is not the case anymore. A quick mind and a reasonable vocabulary is no longer the best way to win, now it is a case of knowing acceptable pairs of letters to create a high score. Words such as qis, zo,qin,li,ohu are the winning choices now. I discovered this when my daughter challenged me to play a Scrabble style game on line. I had no idea what the words she used meant, the dictionary that came with the game simply confirmed that the word was genuine, but not what it meant. I felt she was cheating! She said it was the way things were. I discovered that the only way to solve the problem was to play as she did and just try some weird words and combinations in the hope that they would be accepted. Amazingly they often were… The game has a different board layout to the original Scrabble and the net result is that most of the words vary in length from two letters to four, thus avoiding giving double and triple opportunities to the opponent. In desperation I tried a game with the real Scrabble version on line. I played the computer which accepted, jo, zo,za and produced some very weird words indeed. None of which were in my dictionary, in spite of this I won the game but it did not give me any pleasure.