I grew up playing Scrabble. It is one of the few games I continued to play into adulthood. Every couple of years I fly to Indianapolis to visit my friend Sheryl. My favorite month to visit is February, when we are assured a small snow if not a blizzard. During those chilly evenings, we sit by the fire and play endless games of Scrabble. I admit that my PDA as a Scrabble opponent is not as companionable as Sheryl. For one, it looks askance on four-letter words that are not said in polite company, even if Mr. Webster documented them and Sheryl never challenged them. My PDA also lacks Sheryl’s sense of humor. I’m sure that Sheryl would have no trouble accepting the word “elfpies” especially during the holiday season.

The PDA game differs from the board game in that my opponent challenges every word I use. When playing the board game with humans, your opponent can challenge a word; however, if the opponent is wrong, and the word does indeed exist, the opponent loses his/her turn. If your opponent is right, meaning there is no such word, you lose your turn. Since the PDA game has the official Scrabble Dictionary coded into it, every move is tested against the dictionary. If you try to use an unofficial word, the system stops you. You have the option to override the injunction, but the warning screen is usually enough to take the wind out of your sails.

After you get over your original annoyance with the dictionary, though, it does serve to make the game more interesting. Sometimes I just start laying down letters testing to see if the dictionary will accept them as a word. I use the “Score” button to see if it is an acceptable word, and even more important, how many points it is worth. This way, I can test word without making a commitment. Once I decide on a move, I tap the “Done” button to register the move.

Another departure from the board game is that the PDA distributes the tiles. This must be the reason why I often end up with all vowels or all consonants. All consonants are especially a bummer, especially if it is your turn to open the game. I recently had to open the game with the word “pht.”

If my tiles are real dogs, I can exchange them. When I do, I usually get worse tiles. Although my digital opponent trades tiles at least once every game, I have never seen the benefit of this strategy. For one, you can’t make any points on a turn where all you exchange tiles. Second, if you exchange high value tiles (like J, Q or Z) your opponent can get them and use them on a triple-point square. Nevertheless, the more expert the opponent, the more likely it will invest at least one turn on tile exchange. Perhaps I am not experienced enough to see why.

Although I don’t often speak of my Scrabble opponent in complimentary terms, I do have options with regards to how it behaves. When setting up a new game, I can define one to three opponents and select their characteristics. If I choose a computerized opponent, I can define its skill level: beginner, novice, intermediate or expert. If I choose a human opponent, I can opt for us both to use the same device or to beam moves back and forth from two devices via bluetooth or infrared.

I can also choose to establish either a friendly or tournament rule set. If “Friendly” I can opt to allow the “Suggest Move” feature, a handy learning tool that asks the PDA to find a move for you. It is particularly useful for opening and ending moves, but it isn’t foolproof. I have often made a word that gained more points than the one the PDA suggested. What it did teach me is that a two-letter word can rack up a lot of points if used in a parallel play.

A parallel play is one in which you stack a word on top of  (or below) another (instead of the standard perpendicular crossword-type move.) In a parallel move, each of the letters makes a new word when combined with the letter above or below. In this case, you get points for each of the words you make.

When I first began to play PDA Scrabble, I set my computerized opponent at the “expert” level. I don’t know if I ever won a game at this level. What I did learn is that Scrabble is as much a game of strategy as it is a test of linguistic prowess. The object of the game, my opponent taught me, was to capitalize on the colored squares: light and dark blue for double and triple letter scores, pink and red for double and triple word scores. You get a fifty-point bonus if you use all your tiles in a single move. Usually you can’t. In this case, a three- or four-letter word, strategically placed, especially in parallel mode, can bring you a bigger score than a seven-letter word placed on ordinary squares.

The “Game” menu allows you to view past games and scores and to see a “score summary” that tells you how many points you and your opponent(s) made on a move-by-move basis. The “View” menu allows you to view the “tile distribution,” the number of game tiles that exist for each letter, the “board legend,” which tells you the point values of the colored squares, and “look up word,” which allows you to see the definition of any of the words used in the current game.

The “Options” menu allows you to beam the Scrabble game or the dictionary to another device via infrared or bluetooth. You can also turn on and off such features as the automatic dictionary display, the timer or the feature that saves previous games. The only thing the menus lack that I would really like to see is an “undo move” feature that allows me to rethink some of the stupid moves I make.

If you decide to get Scrabble, I recommend that you also purchase “Dictionary to Go” ($9.95) from the same site. This well-presented dictionary is useful to double-check some of the Scrabble dictionary’s decisions, improve your spelling or cheat your digital opponent.