My family has a long tradition of playing cards, which we were taught as children as soon as we could tell the cards apart. If you had five or more people, the game of choice would be poker, four people—bridge, three—pinochle, two—gin rummy, and one—solitaire.
I remember both my parents playing solitaire to relax them in the evenings, and I follow the same practice, as do some of my brothers and sisters. There is something soothing about shuffling the cards, laying them out carefully in piles on the table, and slowly revealing each one to see what can be done.
My ritual is to play until I go out, no matter how long that takes. If it happens in five minutes, I’m disappointed. If it takes more than half an hour, I might quit and go to bed if I’m too tired to keep going.
I never understood people who play solitaire on their computers, iPads, or smart phones. Their passion for any game on the computer, in fact, mystified me.
Until a friend showed me word games on my iPhone. I’m a big fan of Boggle, but have no one to play it with. On my iPhone, I can play with friends or strangers any time of day with a game called Scramble based on the same principle as Boggle. You get a square filled with letters and two minutes to find all the words you can make with the letters adjacent to or diagonal to each other.
Another friend showed me Letterpress, which is now my favorite game. It is not timed, so you can relax and play at your own speed. Again, you get a block of random letters and have to make words out of them, but in Letterpress, you can also steal the letters your opponent used. You get more points for the letters you steal, and no points for using your own letters again. The game is over when all the letters in the square have been used up.
I started playing these games innocently, just to see what they were like. I didn’t expect to find them more appealing than the solitaire I play with a physical deck of cards at night.
I had thought that the physical process of laying out cards was important to me, but now that I’ve been playing iPhone word games, shuffling and laying out real cards seems tedious.
I can finally see the attraction in computer games—they really ARE addictive!
You start innocently enough, trying one, but then if you have any reason at all to want to escape from your life, you just dive in.
When I get up in the morning and turn on my iPhone, it notifies me of all the games I’m in the middle of—people waiting for me to make my move so they can make theirs.
I’m needed. These people are counting on me. They relish the opportunity to show off their stuff, to expand their brains, or to cheat and look up better words than I can come up with.
When I go to bed at night, the last thing I do is check to see if anyone is waiting for me to take my turn in a game. I hate to turn the phone off and leave in the middle of one, but if I don’t, I’ll be up all night.
And yes, when I do get up in the middle of the night thanks to a bout of insomnia, I don’t have to watch an old movie on TV or read a book. I’ve got friends waiting to play games with me. I just turn on my iPhone and if there isn’t a game already in progress, I can start as many new ones as I want to. There is always someone out there ready to play.
Sometimes I play scramble with my sister, who lives in another state. We used to like to play boggle, and though nothing will replace sitting at a table together, shaking the cubes up, and competing at the same time, Scramble comes close. It gives me the sense that I am sharing time with my sister even though we are miles away.
When my iPhone buzzes me that my sister is ready to play, I stop what I’m doing and join her.
Notes: Boggle is a trademark of Hasbro. Scramble is an iPhone app, also available for the Android. There are evidently a number of Boggle-like games you can play online. If you’re a scrabble lover, you might like Words With Friends. Letterpress is an app by atebits. More favorite word games are in this Huffington Post article.
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