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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is an author of fiction, cookery books and poetry anthologies. Her latest book is ‘The Dinner Table’, a collection of food writing
The news that Scrabble is to update both board and rule book in order to become “less competitive” has caused minor consternation among the profoundly competitive (myself included). I was raised competitive, by competitive parents: my mother is a person who once tipped a fully loaded Risk board into the lap of a guest in a ferocious dispute vis-à-vis the invasion of Kamchatka; my father is the kind of old sea-lawyer who gets more from the argument caused by the game than the game itself. Scrabble has long been a family flashpoint.
You would think, then, that this new version might be just the ticket. According to Mattel, it will contain “cards which provide help, prompts and clues can be selected to match the player’s chosen challenge level”. The first person to succeed at 20 of these “challenge cards” wins. This is, apparently, in order to better appeal to the young. “Younger people . . . want to avoid competitive games,” beams Scrabble champion Brett Smitheram. “[They favour] teamwork and collaboration, working towards a fun goal together.”
Does it out me as a grouch if I admit that something about the phrase “working towards a fun goal together” somehow implies the exact opposite? This isn’t to diminish truly co-operative board games, which I love at least in part because I was raised competitive: in a proper co-operative game, nobody loses. This new Scrabble, as far as I can see, is the worst of both worlds — a game in which one person is competing against others to win, but in which that victory has no honour. We all know what Scrabble is supposed to be, and this is not it.
Scrabble lives and dies by the functional simplicity of the thing: a handful of letters, rearranged any way you like, scores clearly demarcated on both board and tile. The beauty of the game is that it does not require a rule book; and once you have played once you can play forever, improving every time. Every word your opponent uses against you is a weapon for you to use against them next time, and vice versa. To be knocked out by a spectacularly well-placed jukebox, a quasi-mystical syzygy, or a deft little qi — well, what a way to go. You’ll never forget; you’ll learn; you’ll grow. You’ll have your revenge.
We have so few avenues left to us, in this life, for wholesome revenge. We have a currency and traffic lights and trains (sort of), and people wait their turn in queues. Yet until relatively recently, in the grand scheme of things, we tore each other apart with our bare hands over a stolen berry. The envy and anger and hunger is all still in there, and we must learn to live with it or die. Where else, but Scrabble, is there safe space for the true darkness of man’s heart?
This is how we learn: not just about muzjiks and crwths and qat, but to have the chutzpah (77) to handle the quixotic (76) ways of fate, and in doing so exorcise (67) our own worst big feelings. Play matters to adults almost as much as to children, in that it lets us practise how to be people. When we play, we practise in a low-stakes way how to deal with disappointment and envy and bruised feelings; how to lose with dignity and win with grace; how to struggle in small ways so that we aren’t surprised when we have to struggle in big ways.
Sometimes people ask me for writing advice, and I tell them: do something else that you think you will be even worse at. Learn a language with a different script; wire a plug or make a pot or grow a plant. Climb a wall. Jump off. Do things that scare you, or live forever in the comfort zone. Play the proper version of Scrabble with somebody cleverer than you, and do everything you can to win. Lose hard; try harder.
Would my parents play the updated version? “Darling, what would be the point?” Quite (42, if carefully deployed for that triple word score.)
