On Spite: Folly Comes Daily

When Kit and I are talking spite, we are talking about Scrabble.

Were you to play the word SPITE outright in Scrabble, it would earn seven points. P is worth three, the others earn one each. If you got SPITE without using any tiles already on the board, you’d draw five new letters out the tile bag, adding them to the two letters remaining in your hand. As long as enough letters are in the bag, players must end their turns with seven tiles.

Now, seven points aren’t many. But depending on where you place SPITE in play, you might score more. Special squares on the Scrabble board increase the value of individual letters and whole words, sometimes tripling them. In this way, Scrabble isn’t necessarily about sesquipedalianism (raw, QI is worth eleven, as is ZA; LOGICAL is ten). Using all seven letters in your hand is a bingo and earns a bonus of fifty.

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Kit and I play a lot of Scrabble. In around one hundred games against multiple opponents, she has laid down ninety-one bingos. She hella good. Of our thirteen games, she’s won eight. Not important. I’ve won five. Also, not important. That Kit wins, most times, handily? Maybe statistically significant, but clearly no one here cares about stats. At present, she has scored a total of 4,826 points over all our games. I just scored 38, bringing my total to 4,538—whoa! Before that play, I had exactly 4,500 points. Neat! About those 38 points: she scored 27 on her turn; I am ahead. Do you think I am pleased?

Nope.

Because:

Kit is a boss at Scrabble. I played what is certainly the best play of my life in a game with her—142 points on one word. QUENCHING. I linked my seven tiles to two letters already on the board. It was my third play of the game. And I was shook the whole-ass rest of the match. I knew she could catch me. Overtake me. Sly away my lead and win.

Remember those 38 points I just scored? Well, Kit scored 38 points—exactly—on her next turn. Felt personal.

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Here are three approaches to Scrabble.

The first I’ll call “Scrabble as fluency”: plays are limited to words you can spell and define.

The second? How about “Scrabble as communiqué”? Earning points comes secondary to tendering messages to opponents by way of your plays—inside jokes, shit talk, nicknames, etc.

The third would be “Scrabble as math.” Here, you recognize sanctioned combinations of letters (er ... words) and play them, even if you don’t know what the words mean.

Fluency mode is my go-to. If I combined fluency with communiqué, I’d find me replete. I say Scrabble as communiqué is Scrabble more like poetry. When I use communiqué, Kit, who pokes at poetry with a long, sharp stick to make certain it’s dead before skulking past it, places her tiles in ways that—I’m not saying intentionally—obliterate my bespoke communiqués along with my hopes of winning.

Math mode is my least favorite, even though it’s what you’ll learn playing the Scrabble app against Master and Grand Master bots. It’s not that math or bots make math mode less poetic. Rather, what cools me to it is the sense that one need go only as deep as the tile surfaces, requiring no lexical flashbacks, no activated etymological association, no anagrammatic hoodoo into logos. Yes, this is bias, y’all, a preference for how seven letters and a board of words spark memory and connection.

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As is true of many competitive games, Scrabble has offense and defense.

Remember the squares that increase point totals? When you play a tile on a violet square, the word(s) that intersect there are “triple word scores,” multiplying the point sum by three. Pale orange “double word scores” multiply by two. My QUENCHING bingo crossed a couple of double word scores. Triple and double letter squares—deep and dusty blue respectively, also array the board’s gridwork. A defensive opponent might pass up points to circumvent setting their competitor up; since Scrabble requires that players place a tile in contact with a letter already on the board, avoiding playing tiles within one column or row of special squares makes getting those bonuses more difficult.

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Before our first game, Kit expressed irritation that her opponents weren’t playing defense against her. She took it as underestimation.

Playing too much on the defense, however, leads me to score fewer points, for fear that Kit will play off my play, snatching one of the eight triple word score squares dotting the perimeter of the board.

Because she does. Lots.

That’s why, with the choice of finding a higher score elsewhere in the board’s interior, I’ll play a shit word on the edge, moldering gloriously on a triple word score with words like TO (two points times three for a product of six) or SIT (totaling nine) just so Kit can’t get it with one of her point-booming, elegant-ass, WTF words. This appears spiteful. But it’s just good defense.

My sour smile isn’t smugness. Right?

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In most of our games, the board ends up being a lexicon of intersecting fluency. I can sometimes recall communiqués I traded for a few extra points, spelling to win; still, I lose. Point-wise, yes. And spiting myself, denying deeper connection with the friend on the board’s far side reading what I’ve laid down.

However, let me read our board again. Let me see what’s there. Across the letters, what might I find beyond ambition but instances of risk, agitation, keen chagrin, sudden excitement? Our fluencies associatively come to communicate our play, not necessarily narratives of our turns, but a stilled passage of time that often feels personal. There’s poetry in that board’s fluencies, despite competition. LURED crosses RELOOK at their shared E. FOLLY comes DAILY, and these days are WARM. What are we saying together when we read this way?

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Kit and I determined spite is a blurred trajectory of envy into anger into joy.

1. My envy eyes the better hand my opponent surely has.
2. My point-thirst angers me. How the hell they gonna take MY points?
3. My joy blooms upon the pleasure of taking something from my opponent, even at my expense.

JOY on a triple word score totals thirty-nine points. One more than the thirty-eight I scored that Kit just scored back.

I wish I could play JOY on the triple word, but I find myself stuck with twenty-one.