Online Shopper: Accessorizing At The Buena Vista Scrabble Club

LAST week a winter storm blew into town like a stranger with a bad attitude.

The lights flickered. The windows rattled. And as effortlessly as a drunken gunslinger sweeps a bartop full of shot glasses onto the saloon floor, the wind upended all the potted plants on the porch.

I stepped over the wreckage delicately.

It meant nothing to me.

I was on my way to a Scrabble game.

Most nights there is a pickup game somewhere on the block. Here on Buena Vista Avenue, we are battling winter by huddling in front of fireplaces, trying to remember whether its acceptable to add an s to QINTAR, which as everybody on our street knows is a former coin of Albania.

We have kept things neighborly, even on the rare occasion when a player is suspected of furtively consulting the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary between turns before playing, say, PEKAN. (Of course, its entirely possible that the player in question knew off the top of her head that a pekan is a carnivorous animal, and if so, congratulations on the 21 points, Ella.)

We cant help being a competitive bunch. The other night, after the team of Zoe and Jake opened the game aggressively with FLAMBES (101 points), the rest of us congratulated them in tones perhaps best described as falsely hearty.

And it has come to my attention recently that certain players are upgrading more than their skills. At Tinas and Hals house, I couldnt help admiring a handsome mahogany Scrabble Premier Edition, which came with a cute hourglass timer ($149 at Restorationhardware.com).

Birthday gift, Tina said, as she played FUG (40 points).

The next night I saw the same set at Bruce and Stephanies house.

Hanukkah gift, Bruce said, as he scored 39 points with QUOTE.

So I was thrilled to find under the tree on Christmas morning my own mahogany Scrabble Premier Edition. After I ripped off the wrapping paper, I gave the lazy susan a spin and started fantasizing about a winter filled with QWERTY (the typists keyboard), ZEK (a gulag inmate) and triple-triple words stretching across eight tiles.

But as I greedily went through the sets compartments — finally, my own leatherette tile bag! — something was wrong.

Where was the cute hourglass timer?

Missing.

And the special score pad with matching pencil?

Missing.

The next day I returned the set to a bricks-and-mortar Restoration Hardware store only to face further defeat. The premier edition sets were sold out, and as I didnt have the receipt, my only recourse was store credit.

Sold out?

The news was no surprise to John D. Williams Jr., the executive director of the National Scrabble Association.

This is our busiest week, he said by phone. We get more calls than almost any other week of the year for two reasons. One is people who just got a new game for Christmas, and they want to know the rules. The other is settling disputes: Honey, I have the man from Scrabble on. Hes going to tell you Im right.

With 100 million sets sold worldwide and 40 million so-called leisure players (like the Buena Vista neighbors group), Mr. Williams said, more people are Scrabble addicts than ever. Players gather regularly for games at more than 200 clubs nationwide affiliated with the association, and the contact information for each is listed at Scrabbleassociation.com.

For a game invented by an unemployed architect in the early 1930s (Theres an entertaining account of Scrabble history in Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, which I also received for Christmas and which costs $10.65 at Amazon.com), Scrabble has come a long way.

What urge drives players to buy fancy sets and accessories? I asked Mr. Williams.

Its like anything, whether youre a Nascar aficionado or an Elvis fanatic, he said. Theres the idea of identity, of being part of a subculture. People love customization, whether its a vanity license plate or a customized Scrabble board.

Which, by the way, you can buy, at Customscrabbleboards.com, where for $175 to $280 you can have your name painted on a personalized board featuring pinstripes or gold leaf lettering.

Beyond the mahogany premier edition, theres a whole universe of Scrabble accessories and add-ons. Serious players often buy a set of so-called tournament tiles from sites like Protiles.net, where for $15 to $25 for a set of 100 tiles, you can buy printed tiles on which the letters are silk-screened on plastic (rather than indented in wood) to prevent players from reading the letters with their fingers when they pick them from the tile bag.

This brings me to the custom leather tile bags at Domesticleather.com for $10.95 to $12.95 (barrel closure available — call for custom orders) and custom tile racks, including extralong tournament racks ($11.95 to $14.95 each), at Tileracks.net.

And then theres the electronic Franklin Scrabble Dictionary. Its a little hand-held device (marked down to $27.99 at Restorationhardware.com), which the maker describes at Franklin.com as invaluable to players at all levels.

Or as Mike Crincoli, a vice president at Franklin Electronic Publishers, explained: It has all kinds of crossword puzzle solver features that will improve your game. Type in the letters you have, and it will search for relevant matches. Or enter the letters you see on the board, and a question mark in the spaces where you dont have a letter, and it will tell you the possible words you could make.

The Franklin sounded like an awesome tool. I was thinking of buying one.

I just hope my neighbors never learn about its existence, I told Mr. Crincoli.

I hung up. I had a voice-mail message from Stephanie. I just found out they still have the premier edition in stock at the Restoration Hardware in Berkeley, the message said. I thought youd want to know.

It was a neighborly thing to do. So the next time I see her, Ill definitely mention a tip from Mr. Williams: QI (the Chinese philosophical concept) has been added to the latest edition of the official scrabble players dictionary. But, QIS? She probably doesnt need to know about that one right away.

E-mail: slatalla@nytimes.com

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?