a fun night of scrabble

We still met up for our usual game night yesterday despite Michelle's absence, and still managed to have fun playing an epic round of Scrabble followed by Boggle.  Alan's an expert in a "tight" Scrabble game - he knows all the two-letter words allowed by the Scrabble dictionary and often played overlapping words where he would score points for 3 or 4 words.  James, on the other hand, plays carefully and strategically - just like how he treats everything else in life. I always find it amazing how much you can learn about a person through playing games.

The Scrabble game opened with me laying down the first word followed by Alan's bingo then James' bingo - and by mid-game Alan and I had half given up hope because James was leading by far and had almost double the points compared to what I got.  On top of that, while he was trying to block them, Alan gave away two triple-word-score bonus to James!  It didn't help that Alan kept missing the vowels when he drew from the bag.

When the game was nearing the end and there were no more letters in the bag, I thought, hey, it was still a fun game even though I didn't get the luck to play a bingo.  Then I saw it - my last 7 letters made a word - and one that could fit on the board too.  With the bingo bonus and the penalties they suffered for having unused letters, I ended up coming in first, beating James by 20 points and Alan by over 50!!  Coincidentally, my bingo word that effectively ended the game was "CRUSHER".

Epic.