No “game” snuggles more intimately with our 26-strong alphabet than Scrabble™. This “game” carries few fun-like qualities as its brethren: no pop-o-matic bubbles, no chutes or ladders, no collecting of railroads, no sinking of battleships, no invasion of countries, no repeated beatings of hungry hippopotamuses. Scrabble is a game of angst, turmoil and desecration whose sole element of fun generally exists as you sigh with relief after unloading a few merciless letters.

Still, I love to play. But I rarely win. That’s because I’ve grown up playing against Scrabble demons. Scremons. I can’t resist returning to them, setting up the board, shaking out some letters, not immune to the fact that I will lose and suffer a tension headache afterward.

Here is what one Scremon,Simon, wrote when I solicited thoughts on the great game of letters: “I can tell you just about everything I did during 1993, and yet I spent three days last week searching my apartment, wondering where I’d put my wallet. It’s the same peculiarity that makes me a champion at Trivial Pursuit but a failure at life - being right about everything that doesn’t matter and wrong about everything that does. So it goes.”

I don’t know what that means and I guess he’s good at Trivial Pursuit too. He and his wife have invited me many times to their condo to get killed at Scrabble. They always set up the spinning board so eagerly, like lions tracking a wounded caribou or my nine-month-old son pulling a blueberry to his mouth. On one occasion I was whisper-close to victory, but was of course done in by a late-stage Q pulled from the lavender bag of promise. Nowhere on the board was a usable U.

Each Tuesday at a Boston pizza joint (that is a small “p” for the record, denoting an establishment in the city of Boston) I had several pints of Harpoon IPA while waiting for waitress Eva to finish her shift. I waited in front of a Scrabble board. It was Scrabble night. I didn’t bother with any low-lifes, I needed to defeat Eva.

One day I will track her down and do so.

Eva was a tiny creature with glasses whose fragility and unassuming nature belied the violence she waged on the Scrabble board. Along with an ethereal vocabulary (I learned not to challenge her words), she possessed a strategy that confined me to a prison of my own making. That she served me beer made matters slightly better.

From the outset, Scremon Eva would play only two- or three-letter words – a subject she must have written her dissertation on. She would never break open the board with a longer word. Ever. While arranging her pygmy words, she would of course hit the double and triple scores. And look at me with a polite expression that hinted, “But of course.” 

After a while, she would force my hand and I would play a longer word after exhausting all shorter possibilities. Instantly, Eva would unleash a 60-point bomb as if she were a chess master seeing this play five moves ago. I offer another word to catch up: 21 points! Yes! Eva’s next bomb nets 45 points. And on and on it goes toward the inevitability of a 200-point margin of victory that is not for me.

So I’m left to consider that my reasonable skills at writing do not transpose to assembling letters on a Scrabble grid. In grim times I have turned to Jackie, my wife, to play. Surely I can defeat the one whose report cards I copyedit? But the games wind up far closer than I would have imagined. And in the end, Jackie smiles the smile of victory while I scrutinize the board as if it were lying.

A few years ago she proposed to me that she had never played a game of Scrabble without cheating. Her tone was that this basic strategy is free to employ and only the foolish do not.

With Jackie’s wisdom I am coming for you, Eva. Vengeance will be mine, Scremon.