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Section: Life & Leisure
A Scrabble Tourney at Your House
By Ed Adamczyk
There have been over 100 million boxes of the board game Scrabble sold since its emergence in 1948, two million new sets per year. This very American game of chance, skill and vocabulary has been exported to 21 countries, has a growing Internet presence, and can be found in one out of three American homes. If yours is one of them, it’s time to dust off the Scrabble box and organize a dining room tournament for a sensationally good cause.
Literacy Volunteers of Buffalo and Erie County, the non-profit organization whose pro-literacy mission dovetails nicely with the idea of competitive word-spelling, will present its fourth annual Scrabble Fest fundraiser during the month of February.
The idea is to host a Scrabble Party at home, pledge a donation and determine a winner among the participants. The winner will then participate in one final Scrabble-Off to determine Western New York’s foremost Scrabble enthusiast.
“The kickoff event is in the afternoon of February 4, at the Hard Rock Café in Niagara Falls,” says Literacy Volunteers executive director Tracy Diina. “We’ll be inviting all the hosts.” At least 50 are expected to host events, and more are welcome. “Then we’ll go into a month of house parties, and it’s very flexible. The average party brings in about $300, but we’re just as grateful for a $40 party.”
And if you find yourself Scrabble champion of your party, there will be a seat for you at the Scrabble Fest finale, March 7 at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum on Porter Avenue in Buffalo; Time Warner Cable is Scrabble Fest’s primary sponsor.
“We’ll have a daylong Scrabble event. All the house party winners will get together for a tournament, and we’ll also invite the public to play Scrabble,” says Diina.
The big Scrabble-Off that concludes the fundraiser will look a lot like a big party for Scrabble enthusiasts, and popular culture suggests they are legion. The game is played throughout the world (there are French, German and Arabic versions), online and in a hyper-competitive world populated by eccentric devotees as noted in the book Word Freak by National Public Radio correspondent Stefan Fatsis.
The Literacy Volunteers event is not expected to be so cutthroat, and the organization welcomes anyone with a Scrabble board to invite some friends for a home party — “beer and chips, fancy brunches, whatever” says Diina — to raise a donation and choose a representative to the finals.
It remains to be seen who will compete for the title of Western New York’s Scrabble experts on March 7, but a cross-section of literate local word enthusiasts, crossing lines of age and experience, is expected.
That lovers of words will convene to benefit learners of words is somehow appropriate. Since 1965, Literacy Volunteers of Buffalo and Erie County has been the region’s sole provider of free, one-on-one adult and family literacy services. Its mission includes basic reading skills, English for speakers of other languages, youth after-school programs, tutoring and more. A total of 400 tutors throughout Erie County annually serve over 300 adults and 250 young people.
The Scrabble crowd can sign up, pledge a donation and organize a party at any time throughout February. Getting to the March 7 finals is as easy as crushing everyone else in the room at the board game you’ve likely played and enjoyed for years. More information is available at Literacy Volunteers, 876-8891.
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