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Friday, August 10, 2007

Scrabulous


Longtime readers know that UD plays virtually non-stop Scrabble with her older sister (the one who's not a Morrissey freak) whenever her sister's visiting. She and her sister are eerily well-matched and extremely competitive, so I wouldn't call the experience fun. But it's compelling.

Much more intense, I guess, is the just-released Scrabulous, described by a Scrabble-loving writer for the Telegraph:

Cyber-scrabble is on the march. Only two months after the launch on the social networking site Facebook of an application called Scrabulous - which allows you to play with your friends online - 200,000 people are reported to have signed up.

The historian Tom Holland, another Fleet Street regular, says the online game "is to normal Scrabble what an Olympics in which all the athletes openly took steroids would be to clean athletics", and likens its pace to that of a "test match".


Given the already insane intensity of my Scrabble matches with my sister, I'm not sure I'm strong enough for Scrabulous. And the old-fashioned form, as the writer notes, really has its moments:

Sure, you remember the great bingos - when you play all seven letters from your rack, incurring a 50-point bonus and a feeling of what we might call world rulership. I once got "BIRTHDAY" across two triple-word scores, notching up a score so flabbergasting that I'm doing a little dance, right now, in public, five years on.