Sorry for using a word .....

....that you don’t understand, but Lexulous does and so does the scrabble. Try it.

Scrabble and Lexulous are the games that are played online, mainly on Facebook. I play it regularly usually as a detour from my regular task of reading and blogging. With strangers I don’t enjoy the game but I like playing with friends, with whom I can chitchat and keep in touch. I have made many good friends on scrabble board and on Lexulous and have been regularly in touch with them. Actually, these games allow many weird words that we will never find in our text books, the trick is to place your letters, sometimes guessing a word, hoping that lexulous or scrabble will understand and voila, sometimes it does. But if it is at the expense of annoying my friends, then that gets me really stressed out because I really hate losing friends. I have very few friends and all very precious, wouldn’t like them to go off at a tangent over a game, which is just a game.

For me winning/losing is not the criteria, I just like to make the best word that I can. I have been playing this game for many years, precisely for more than twenty-five years. The first time I saw this game was during my trip abroad and I was fascinated by tiny wooden tiles. I played that game immediately and lost miserably but fell in love with it. I bought my first scrabble board, a tiny travel board with tiny tiles and holes on the board to fix the tiles ( this board and tiles, neatly saved and restored, are still lying at my home in Tenerife, Spain, hibernating and they come alive only when I visit my family)

During my college years, I taught this game to all my friends and we would play this game non-stop for days and sometimes all night. We allowed dictionary so that we could learn new words and we always played for fun; snacking and fooling in-between games. Over the years, I learnt some tricks on how to confuse the opponent and win the game. I taught those tricks to my friends too who would use it against me and make me lose. In Mumbai, I joined scrabble club, where we would play it regularly and even participated in many scrabble tournaments, much of which I lost. But I was never offended if I lost and always came out stronger each time.

Most of the time it is pure luck that we may get good combination to be able to make seven-letter word which gives an impressive score. It is not the deciding factor for showing off the intelligence or word power, nor are there any laurels to be won. The opponents who play with me regularly are equally good, and they do have impressive scores and rankings, so there is nothing to feel egoist about winning. But most of the time I am lucky. (maybe because I am unlucky in love. Huh?) I have some friends who continue to play with me and before one game ends they have already started a new one. They tell me that it is challenging playing with me and I get aggressive too.

But lately I have been offending my friends by winning. Now I can’t play badly and let my friends win, can I? That will not be fair. I don’t understand why they get so discouraged by my winnings? Why can’t they get aggressive and fight back? Why do they have give up on me? Must they always win and play with only those whom they can beat easily? Don’t they like challenges any more?

And why do I get stressed out if they give up on me? Now that is the question I need to introspect.