Photos by Brian Goddard Max Avalon says that playing Scrabble at weekly club meetings in Phoenix helps keep his mind sharp as he gets older.

For these competitive word gurus who will face off at the annual Phoenix Scrabble Tournament this month, Scrabble isn’t just a game. It’s a way of life.

If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on the I-10, chances are you’ve attempted to stave off road rage by amusing yourself with little games, like counting the number of drivers singing to themselves or – a popular pastime even with light traffic – decoding vanity license plates.
But if you’ve ever encountered a white Volkswagen with the plate AAAGMNR, the frustration of trying to interpret its meaning was probably enough to send you over the edge.
Inside this vehicle are husband and wife Larry Rand and Barbara Van Alen, who are on their way to direct the weekly meeting of the Phoenix Scrabble Club. While their license plate may look like gibberish to most, competitive Scrabble players like Rand and Van Alen take one look at it and smile knowingly.
If the secret meaning of AAAGMNR has not yet come to you, you probably would not fare too well at the upcoming Phoenix Scrabble Tournament to be played at The Inn at Pima in Scottsdale over President’s Day weekend. In fact, you probably would be eaten alive.
The fact that Scrabble – that sweet, innocent, educational word game that most people dust off to play with their grandparents after holiday dinners – would inspire organized tournaments in a sometimes dog-eat-dog atmosphere, comes as a surprise to most people. But any of the 2,300 or so active tournament Scrabble players in the United States and Canada could tell you that the competition is fierce and sometimes downright ruthless.

Some members of the Phoenix Scrabble Club, like Patrick Hodges, take the game to new levels by customizing their game boards (top).

James Johnson, a Phoenix Scrabble player who has been playing competitively since 1998, tells the unsettling story of a game he played against a less-than-ethical opponent at a tournament in Reno, Nevada, several years ago.
“It was the beginning of the tournament, and our game hadn’t started yet, so I was turned towards the tournament director who was finishing up his announcements. When I turned back to face the board, the woman I was playing had already begun the game. She played the word QUERY for 54 points and started my time clock without my even knowing it. Consequently, I lost the game and was upset for the rest of the tournament,” Johnson says.
Yes, Scrabble can be a cutthroat world but, to be fair, the scenario that Johnson describes is not typical of the average tournament game. While most Scrabble players want to win (and badly) they generally stop short of deception or outright cheating. In fact, most players are actually quite civil toward their opponents and often form long-lasting friendships or – as is the case with Rand and Van Alen, who met at the Phoenix Scrabble Club in 1996 – romantic relationships.
“Our honeymoon was on a Scrabble cruise to Mexico in 2000,” says Rand, who along with Van Alen now organizes five Scrabble tournament cruises per year through their homespun travel agency.
If you think spending all day at sea playing a board game, mostly against people whom you did not just wed, seems like an odd way to spend your honeymoon, you would certainly not be in the minority. But Scrabble players are a unique bunch, so weaving the game into their romantic lives is not all that uncommon.