Finally.

A documentary about Scrabble.

I will admit that my extended family gatherings are dominated by the competition in this game. In addition to normal Scrabble, we are partial to a number of variations, although since I always lose in those I prefer to play the traditional version, where I kick ass.

Speed Scrabble: The letters are placed faced down on the table. Each player takes seven letters and must make a crossword that uses all your letters. The first one who finishes says "done" and every player has to take another letter and repeat the process, until no more letters are left. The winner is the one who has no letters leftover. I always lose. I've one maybe twice in my life. My cousin and my brother always win. I'm not sure why we even bother playing anymore.

Cutthroat Anagrams: My brother always wins this one too. Always. I've won once in hundreds of games and the same can be said for each of my cousins. The letters are placed face down on the table and each player takes turns flipping over letters. If a word can be made (for example t, c and u are flipped over) the first person to yell 'cut' gets to keep the word. However, if the next letter flipped over is, for example, e, then someone else can yell 'cute' and steal the word. The person with the most words at the end wins. It's stressful.

Obviously if our holidays weren't spent in the frozen wilds of New Hampshire we could come up with something better to do, but we're stuck with eating massive quantities of food, battling the squirrels in the attic, fishing dead mice out of the toilet and Scrabble.