Scrabble at the Firefly

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At the Firefly Club on Wednesdays, happy hour is devoted to Scrabble. For more than a year, Susan Chastain has opened her jazz nightclub at 5 p.m. once a week to all who want to play the world's best word game. The club provides the boards and tiles. You bring the brains.

Participants run the gamut from novices to hotshots, from teenagers to septuagenarians. Chastain's ebullient hospitality sets the tone: the atmosphere is unintimidating. Yet there's plenty of serious strategizing. Folks who think they're pretty good Scrabble players often get a rude awakening when they play outside their circle of family and friends — learning, perhaps, how foolish it is to hoard your Q or J, and how smart it is to trade in tiles early in the game.

Many who come to the Firefly are lifelong devotees of Scrabble, a game whose pleasures are enduring and uncanny. Like the perfect distances that Alexander Cartwright devised between the bases in baseball, Alfred Butts's genius is one of life's mysteries. The game he invented in 1938, with its fifteen-by-fifteen grid, its 100 letter tiles, and its bonus squares, still offers discoveries every time it's played.

Purists may balk at the bizarre words in the new, fourth edition of the official Scrabble dictionary. But don't worry if you don't know a qat from a cwm — the Firefly regulars are happy to share their tips. Some of us, anyway.