Scribbling about Scrabble

There's Scrabble you play with your emerging child speller where you cheer the word "duk" because she is sounding out words and trying to spell them. No score is kept in this game and most rules are either bent or completely disregarded.

There are the Scrabble games you play online with friends, or sometimes with people who have nothing better to do, evidently, than play Scrabble online, as evidenced by their used of the word "vquex" to score 114 points on a triple word play.

There are the Scrabble games that someone somewhere must play where you use a board, tiles, and the actual rules. I don't know anyone who does that, though.

And then . . . . there is Northwoods Scrabble. The board pictured here is an actual game I recently played (I promise, Iris) with two of my children. In Northwoods Scrabble, the idea is to create a word using the tiles on your rack, giving the definition for it after you put the word on the board. While this may suffer from a bit of 'you had to be there' syndrome, here are a few of our definitions:

eieio -- Mr. McDonald's first name.

boqapowa -- bonfire lit by Norwegians making sandwiches for a trip to Germany.

utanlui -- animal which a cross between an Utan and a Lui. Found only in Pakistan.

eicoolie (i-chew-lee) -- trout disease which turns scales yellow.

and finally

vepzuneri -- a Swedish boat constructed from dried utanlui skins and colored with eicoolie-infected trout oil.

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