His game, her game

Number 3 on the Marital Dispute chart, following "Money: Hoard vs. Exchange for Something More Exciting" and "Silverware in the Dishwasher: Up vs. Down" (with a common variation, instituted mainly by males, being "Does Silverware Walk Itself to the Dishwasher?"), is "Recreational Enjoyment: Word Games vs. Non-Word Games."

I personally prefer nice, calm word games where everyone gets along. The women in my family consider Scrabble to be a cooperative game, in which players freely offer helpful advice on how another player's letters could be arranged into a word and where it might best fit on the board. This is done with no thought of how the suggested position might benefit ourselves. Keeping points is frowned upon, as it might damage someone's self-esteem.

Joe does not prefer word games. His favorite games all involve numbers in some manner, whether on dice or cards or scorecards, and the only assistance offered to other players is to help them further into debt, relieve them of some of their points, etc.

Thus you will surmise that Joe does not prefer a game like Bananagrams, the Scrabble-like game in which everyone makes his or her own board with letter tiles. Unfortunately for him, some of our friends LOVE Bananagrams. Joe has cleverly devised several methods for dealing with his dislike of this game. The first is that, when sent to fetch it, he returns nanoseconds later, claiming that it is not to be located. It must be lost! What a shame!

We do not send Joe to find Bananagrams anymore.

When this method of avoiding the game fails, and he is actually made to play it, Joe puts into motion his second method. While everyone else works feverishly to use up all their letter tiles, his tiles sit ignored, as he imagines how to inflict great bodily harm to the person who created this game. If the game has not ended by the time he has finished amusing himself with these thoughts, he cheerfully declines any assistance with his letters and sets about making words similar to the following:

jazry
lim
eaiuoc
retxl

He defends his unorthodox word choices by declaring: "I'm being creative."

But for the first time, Joe has discovered a word game that he actually likes. Or thinks he will like, as we have not actually played it yet. But it may perhaps be the solution that will help smooth over Marital Dispute #3. This panacea is called BuyWord, a game that, unfortunately, does not load the silverware in the dishwasher for you. But it does combine words and numbers. What has attracted Joe most to this game is its objective: that players "do their best to make the largest amount of money." This fits in quite nicely with his personal philosophy of both life and gaming, which is "to do my best to make the largest amount of money."

In this game players buy letters, arrange them into words, and then attempt to make a profit with those words. Unless you are me, in which case you stop at Step 2 -- arrange the letters into words -- and admire the beauty of the words you have created. With this you are content. There is no need to scheme about how you are going to use your beautiful words to cheat someone else out of their beautiful words.

It is possible that BuyWord, rather than helping solve Marital Dispute #3, will merely create a new dispute between spouses with varying gaming preferences, but luckily the game can be played by just one player. Theoretically, then, each person could play in his or her own preferred manner. It is unclear, however, how one goes about making a profit if there are no other players to cheat out of their mon---er, I mean to sell to. Perhaps the one-player version involves the dishwasher in some manner.