I love to play board games occasionally. One of my favorite games is Scrabble. It's easy to learn but near impossible to master (at least for me). It is also one of those classic games that people either love or hate.

The biggest problem I have with playing Scrabble is finding suitable players for myself. I prefer players who are around my own level of skills. Playing with people who are too new is not exciting, and players who are too good are too challenging. I like to win some and lose some, with equal opportunities of both. I also like to play with a variety of different people. Games with strangers are always surprising and unexpected. It's also a great way to pick up new tricks to the game and socialize with interesting people.

As I was saying, finding compatible players is always a challenge. You could join a local Scrabble club, of course. Finding a Scrabble club in any major, and maybe even minor, city to meet once a week to play Scrabble is fairly easy. I tried a few of those sessions back in my school days, but didn't follow up because I could not consistently make the committment of attending the meetings. Ultimately, I found that playing board games with real people over the internet is best for me. In particular, I find the Yahoo! Games website to be my favorite place to play Scrabble.

If you want to play Scrabble online with real people, Yahoo! Games is a great website to visit. They call the game Literati instead of Scrabble because of copyright. It's mostly the same, and any Scrabble player will find Literati familiar. When you click on Play Now! from the Literati web page, a new window appears and you'll see the lounge area. From there, you can start a new game and wait for others to join or join an existing one waiting for people. If you're having trouble using the site, the mechanics of using Yahoo! Games are covered extensively in their Help section, so I won't be regurgitating them here. This is not exactly trivial, as I find that the web page design too crowded and busy, which is my only complaint about Yahoo! Games.

The reason why I like playing board games online is that there are always players available in any game. The site also shows the wins and losses of each player, so I usually find people who have similar rankings to mine. Also the system takes care of all the nitty gritty like handling play pieces and keeping scores. You won't find any missing play piece, either.

More recently, I've also been trying MSN Zones. It is a similar online board game community by Microsoft. They seem to have a lot more players (and games) at any one time. The reason why I don't switch over is because they don't have the classic Scrabble.

Aside from Literati, there are other board games on Yahoo! Games. Most of them are free, multi-player games that you can play with other people online, but a few of them require you to download or pay. Everything is stated clearly, so there's no worry of accidentally buying something. Yahoo! is a huge company, so they aren't trying to trick people.

However, I did find the mixing of free vs. pay and single vs. multi-players games a bit confusing at first. It takes a bit of time to explore the system to get used to it. However, the popular games (including Literati) are listed right at the top of the website, so you don't need to navigate or poke around unless you want to.

If anyone decides to give Literati a try or is already on it, my username there is 'pau1lam'. Please do say Hi if you see me there. Perhaps we can play a game together.