Perhaps the most traditional of the board games, you can’t beat a good old honest Scrabble game on a Sunday afternoon. Or so they say. But from personal experience, a casual few hours of harmless competition against friends or family is never the case. And although everyone begins the game as a meaningless way to while away a lazy day, it always seems to end up with more than vocabulary flying around the room. Too many times have disputes over words such as quorn or the ‘clever’ 2 letter words and abbreviations such as qi turned into an ongoing debate which, in the case of my somewhat competitive family, have been ongoing for years on end. And you know what when your mum vows never to play a game of Scrabble with the rest of you so long as she lives, that Scrabble is more than just a board game. It is a platform for playing out the family strengths and weaknesses and showing who is boss of the brains in the house. Inevitably, everyone is going to want to come out on top. Maybe Eddie Izzard goes too far in saying it ‘was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia,’ however the danger of the dictionary and a player with a competitive streak should not be underestimated. So think twice before venturing to suggest a game of Scrabble on a quiet family afternoon, or it might be more than the Sunday roast that gets heated!
