playing Scrabble online is kind of fun actually

November 05, 2026

back around 2020 or 2021, I would play Letter League (the Scrabble activity on Discord) quite often with a few friends. none of us were that good at it — honestly, the fun of the game is trying to play fake-sounding words like gonch¹ and realizing that they are actually playable. Scrabble is a fun game (I used to play it in Portuguese as a child with an educational psychologist I used to go to), but I didn't really play it outside of the occasions where me and some friends were kind of bored on a Discord call and we decided to play Letter League.

about a week ago, though, I got a recommendation on my YouTube algorithm for a Scrabble YouTuber named Will Anderson (who is himself a competitive Scrabble player; he's notable enough to have a Wikipedia article.) Will's videos are about basically every aspect of the game imaginable: updates to the official dictionary, notable professional matches, comments about the “meta” and so forth. I've been watching one or two videos of his a day ever since, and this has made me want to play Scrabble again.

so, me and my (online) friend Duda started playing on Discord (I got her into the game). we started playing on the Discord activity, Letter League, until I was like: I want to play Scrabble online with other people without having to join a Discord call. sometimes my friends can't join and I just want to play the game. there's a few websites for this, but one of them is the charmingly 2000s International Scrabble Club, with its charmingly 2000s interface and charmingly 2000s sound effects.

I somehow managed to get just ‘matias’ as a username²

I'm not good at the game by any means; I lose almost every match I play against randoms. it does help with playing to know obscure or foreign words like zori (which I almost played once, but my play got blocked by my opponent placing their tiles in that same spot), but that's not where most the strategy is, it seems — you can score a lot of points playing very short and simple words like ma just from the bonus squares and the overlaps the words create. I think I'm going to improve somewhat as I play more, though.

anyway, as you can see in the screenshot, my profile picture on ISC is Nino. we got our first Nino fan on ISC today, even:

and here's some more pictures of him from when he was at the dog hotel last weekend. my parents came over to visit me, and Nino lives with them³, so they had to leave him at the hotel while they were here

scientists have revealed the Hi

gonch is a word I literally just played in a game on ISC today, because I forgot that match had manual challenges turned on. I thought the website would just say my word was invalid and tell me I was playing a phony, but it didn't. the other player challenged my word, and they lost the challenge. gonch is apparently a real word that refers to men's underwear. (Wiktionary)

I would have taken ‘mati’ but that just wasn't available! it's not every day you manage to get a four-character username that's a super common name though so that's to be expected

thank god he doesn't live with me because I live alone and can barely take care of myself let alone a dog. it is kind of sad that I only get to see him once a month though

the oddism spectrum