My Scrabble addiction left me strung out by a computer with xeroxed copies of two- and three-word cheat sheets and a copy of Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis scattered among the soda cans and emptied bags of chips in my pathetic studio apartment.
I’ve come a long way since. I took a good five or six years off Scrabble, moved into a suburban townhouse, entered a Word Rehab Clinic, and stopped seeing the XI/XU triple-letter combination flash in and out of my dreams. Sure, I played a few games of Scrabble on a real board with my relatives during the holidays (they couldn’t understand how they always lost so badly to me), but I never had a full-blown relapse.
That is, until I got my new iPad. It started innocently enough when Electronic Arts announced a temporary price reduction on its version of the game Scrabble for the iPad. For $4.99 (as opposed to the normally priced $9.99), I decided to see how the game translated. When I started telling people that I was hooked again — playing against the computer on the hardest level for two to three hours a night once the children were asleep — I started getting those suspicious looks that Scrabble addicts know well.
But I realized those looks were about something else. They wanted to know why I was playing Scrabble instead of Words with Friends. These like-minded addicts had moved onto something stronger. Scrabble was just a gateway drug. Words With Friends was the chronic, the good stuff, the shit, and it was being shared all over the Internet where anybody could get a taste.
Like all new drugs, the initiation was harsh and a bit disorienting. Sure I was getting a rush from this newfangled version of Scrabble. But something wasn’t right. The board was bigger. There were too many triple-word scores. U’s were worth two points and bingo’s didn’t give you the same amount of points. But by the sixth game I was hooked. I was putting my years of mainlining Scrabble to good use, and soon I was trouncing my friends online: 480 – 353, 390-275, 420-359 … The high was amazing.
But like any high, some time you’ve gotta come down. So I’ve started playing the traditional version of Scrabble once more, weaning myself off the turbo-charged Words With Friends and thinking about how long I can avoid responding to an online challenge. Soon I’ll try to stop playing Scrabble, too, so I can find my balance. Maybe I’ll just browse the Internet for hours or read an eBook on my Kindle app. Yeah, that should do it; that should get me back into the real world.
