Scrabble
I’ve never been a Scrabble fan. And yet I found this extract from Oliver Roeder’s book fascinating. He hits the nail on the head as to why kids dislike the game: “The problem when you start playing Scrabble— especially if you start as a kid — is simply that you don ’ t know many words… You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a word, any word, with the tiles on your rack, and then trying to figure out where to play them, and discovering that the whole enormously frustrating effort was worth, like, six points.” One has to rise “one step above beginner” to begin to enjoy the game: “Anagramming is an addictive intellectual rush. Unscrambling AAABLOPR, DFGGHIOT, or EILLMNOU for the first time feels like exercising a minor superpower.” But if you want to be really good, like competitive good, then the process begins to sound like chess: “One must study. One first learns the “twos,” or two- letter words… Many of them are already familiar: AN...