WORDPLAY

Am I Supporting My Daughter’s Words With Friends Addiction?

Or is she throwing a bone to decrepit old Dad?

My wife contemplating the board

Fathers have obligations to daughters. I have no sons, but I imagine that if I did and he suggested he’d like some help splitting logs with a hand axe, I could tell him to go rent a log splitter and be done with that “help me” nonsense.

Not so with daughters. The British have the expression “Needs must”. I’d say the original was “Daughters needs must.”

So when my daughter asked me if I’d like to join her Words 2 Club competition team, of course I said yes. She and I have played Scrabble and WWF for years, from way back when a board on a Lazy Susan was our only way to play. When internet play became possible, we jumped in.

We play lightning fast. I move, she moves, repeat, repeat until the end. We will play dozens of games, sometimes many dozens, in an hour.

And now that she has retired, we often do play for hours. It’s exhausting. My eyes and fingers hurt!

The competition is worse than normal play. You aren’t playing against opposing teams directly, although you could. More often you play against people on your own team and since the object is to score as many points for the team as quickly as…