I first saw my challenger from a distance, and I must admit that I figured I would win at Boggle easily. No-one shorter than me has ever beaten me at Boggle, and neither has a female. This young lady was both shorter than me and, I’m fairly certain, a female. I had this one in the bag. We went to Rum Bar, which has Boggle to offer its patrons (as well as pretty good drink specials: $3 Dark and Stormy’s on Sundays and 1/2 price Mojitos on Mondays). I ordered a Dark and Stormy, and just then it began to rain outside. Fitting, since I was planning on raining on this young ladies parade with a decisive win.
It was about midway through the first round that I noticed that something was wrong. We had been playing for about a minute and a half, and she had never stopped writing words on her paper. “Probably just trying to psyche me out,” I thought. “Those probably aren’t even real words.” But it was unnerving. It became more unsettling when I realized that they were real words, and I was trailing 33-13 after the first round. “Lucky round,” I told myself, unconvincingly. The next round contained a lot of consonants, and not a lot of points were scored. Then round three, and all hell broke loose. Her hand couldn’t keep up with her mind, as she had trouble writing words down as quickly as she could see them. I was starting to unravel. Seeing her write word after word had thrown me off my game, and the letters all began running together, and I froze. I needed something, anything to call off this game. Hurricane, riot, fire, something had to stop this word massacre! But there was no divine intervention, and after the round, we tabulated scores. 79-19 was the final. Oh, well. I’m better at Scrabble anyway.