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GAMES

 

 

You might imagine that with all the activities listed elsewhere I would not be able to cram any more in, but my capacity for wasting time is limited only by the hours in a day. Here are a couple more ways of staving off intrusive and annoying activities (like work).

 

 

Bridge

 

My grandparents taught me to play bridge thirty years ago. Fortunately I had a roommate some years later who was able to repair the damage. Bridge is the ultimate card game, and it is the most difficult game to learn. (All games worth playing require hard work if you want to play them well, but bridge demands intense study if you wish to play it at all.) Its rewards are commensurate with its difficulty. Two links are below. The first is for the ACBL, the American Contract Bridge League. The second is for a good online server run by good on (and off) line friends of mine, Laila Leonhardt and Matt Reklaitis.

 

ACBL

 

Swan Games

 

Scrabble™

 

Scrabble™ is much easier to learn than bridge, but in some ways it’s a higher maintenance game. As Nack Ballard, one who is great at several different games put it: “First you have to memorize the dictionary, then you have to learn the extra 50,000 words in SOWPODS for the world championships, and then after you’ve done all that, you have to constantly review them so you won’t forget.” Fortunately, you don’t have to do that the first night. You get at least a few weeks grace period before someone looks at you in disbelief, and says: “You don’t know the word ‘crwths?’”

 

I play at the two clubs here in Tucson, NSA 363 and NSA 565. The link below is to the Tucson Scrabble website.

 

Tucson Scrabble