Travel Scrabble

This season, Hasbro is pushing their new Scrabble Game Folio, which is designed for travel: the gameboard sits inside a zip-up binder and the miniature tiles snap into place so that the game can easily support airplane turbulence and being packed up mid-game to be finished later. Kenny and I, having appreciated playing Scrabble at our B&B in Manarola after all of the tourist attractions closed, decided to pick one up for our trip to New Orleans.

While compact for a board game, it’s still a bit bulky, and I wouldn’t recommend it for international travel if you are trying to pack light. However, it was fabulous for the plane, and in general for a short domestic trip it seems to work great. We probably played 5 games of Scrabble during our various flights and layovers this week, and it certainly made the time go by faster. This was a godsend for me, since my laptop is out of commission awaiting a new motherboard.

I’m still not great at Scrabble, but definitely improving. I can usually get at least one “bingo” per game these days, and I’m working on memorizing all of the two-letter words (there are 5 new ones in the latest edition of the Scrabble dictionary. Kenny and I managed to use both “za” and “qi” in one game of Scrabble on Sunday :)). The short list of words that use Q but not U are also quite useful. I think we are getting to the point at which those who aren’t big geeks like us don’t enjoy playing with us anymore.

Kenny still beats me at Scrabble more that 50% of the time, but the scores are usually very close (they usually hover around 300 points each). If we continue to fly as much as we have in the past, we should both continue to improve over time. I’m just hoping that I can improve more than he does. ;)