Spellbound: the story of an addiction

What does it for you? Coffee? Gambling? Bombay Sapphire? Or, heaven forbid, are you hooked on stronger stuff, like Dove Bars?

I’ve always prided myself on having a nonaddictive personality. That is, I can keep ice cream in my freezer for a month and have only a tablespoon a night. My pantry is filled with licorice, Chuckles, popcorn and Swedish Fish, but I only have a piece once in a while. Pretty annoying, I know.

So, understand my distress now that I’m in the grip of a irresistible compulsion. My name is Randi, and I can’t stop playing Scrabble.

Oh, I played the board game like everyone else when I was a kid, but it was hit and miss. I even bought the travel version when it came out, but still, it was an occasional pastime. My husband ruined it for me for many years because he refused to play within any kind of time frame. He just plain wore me out, as I waited 15 minutes for him to make a word.

Then my daughter-in-law, of all people, sent me an “invitation” on my iPhone to play Words With Friends, a telephone Scrabble game. I downloaded the app and I was off, playing with Cathy and then my daughter and then other random people.

The game sank its claws into my brain, so that the phone was not enough. I downloaded Scrabble from www.pogo.com and began playing online, with friends. But it got worse. I started playing on Pogo with a robot opponent. It works like this (am I drawing you in?): You select a level of play (easy, normal or hard) and you’re off, back and forth until either you or the robot wins. You can accrue points, check the spelling of a word, exchange tiles or pass a turn. I do well with the “normal” level robot, but I’m no match at all for the “hard” one. I never even heard of half the words it uses.

How do I find the time? friends ask. Easy. I used to write quite a bit, read all the time, cook a fair amount, exercise and tidy up the house now and then. Now I just play Scrabble. It’s all Alfred Butts’s fault. An architect, he invented the game in the 1930s during the Depression, when he was out of work. His inspiration for assigning values to the letters was a code used by Edgar Allen Poe in his story “The Gold Bug.”