I’d like to think of myself as a man of letters. Especially if they can be rearranged to spell BUTTOCK on a double word score square.
Scrabble is in my DNA (not a permissible word by the way). On childhood holidays, we would always bring a board with us, stowed safely in our hand luggage in case of urgent need en route to our destination. While some teenagers were off surfing or trying their luck in Mediterranean nightclubs, I was tussling over high-scoring tiles and arguing with my brother about his latest dubious two-letter word discovery.
My mother claims now that she used occasionally to let us win, but I know a hard-fought victory when I see one. And I recognise the bitter reproach of a parent fairly and squarely defeated.
My dad, not a natural Scrabbler, would usually be somewhere in the background, guffawing loudly at his annual dose of Bill Bryson. We sometimes encouraged him to join us, but he took painfully long over each turn, and would eventually play something like CAT for a measly six points. We left him to his travelogues.
Online apps have enabled a continuation of the familial rivalry into adulthood despite our dispersal around the UK. I was relatively late to the party, my mum and brother having discovered the Scrabble-like Wordfeud game many years ago. By the time I signed up, my brother’s rating had gained such dizzying heights that he was unwilling even to play me, for fear that defeat against a newbie would lose him too many points on the leaderboard.
He needn’t have worried. It took me months to beat him, by which time my own rating had become faintly more respectable – thanks in part to several crushing victories over my children – and so any loss he might suffer against me would invoke a lesser penalty. My rare wins against my younger sibling are a cause for guttural celebration. His usual excellence is a cause for admiring irritation. In one game, he put out all seven letters on six separate occasions.
One Scrabble update and I suddenly understand the furore over the England shirts
Read MoreWhile irksome, feats like these have spurred me on to refine my skills and search out unusual terms that might come in handy in my next game – even though they are unlikely to have much purpose in real life.
For instance, it’s rare that I find myself chatting to friends or colleagues about the position of an object in the sky, expressed as an angle related to a distance on the horizon of the Earth – but AZIMUTH makes for a cracking seven-letter move.
If you’re serious about victory, it is sometimes necessary, too, to push the boundaries of polite behaviour. In the hyper competitive world of Wordfeud, there can be no room for squeamishness. If you have the letters UFINGCK, then I’m afraid there is a clear opportunity to be taken, however crass it might appear on the board. In the pursuit of success against a sibling or a parent, an extra 40 points for using all your letters in one go is vital – there’s no point ducking it.
In a recent game against my mother, the best score I could achieve was with the word VAG. “That’s a bit rude,” she scolded me via an in-app text message. And indeed, I would have felt moderately embarrassed about it had she not played QUIM three turns earlier. When I pointed that out to her, she replied brusquely: “That’s different – I’m an old lady.”
Playing expletives or other fruity words against strangers can be awkward. One opponent I came up against seemed to delight in it – but he had named his account C***yB*****ks, so perhaps he was an outlier.
Still, needs must, and such is the plethora of synonyms for certain parts of the human body that it’s almost inevitable to find yourself putting down BUTT, NOB or worse from time to time.
My wife, a Wordfeud and Scrabble refusenik, is frequently aghast. When she saw me play the words THRUST and then CLIT in a recent game against a stranger, she accused me of being an internet troll. “What would your mother say?!” she asked despairingly.
As it happened, mum had just dropped the C-bomb on a triple word square, so I think she’d have approved.
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