Lots of people I know decided against joining any kind of large-scale New Year’s Eve celebrations in public places this year. For me, at least, a quiet evening spent at home after a hectic December sounded more enticing than any drunken bash. So right up until about 10:00p, my girlfriend and I were still on the fence about attending a few parties to which we’d been invited. But ultimately, we couldn᾿t resist the coziness of our apartment, so we stayed in and watched Hal Ashby and Warren Beatty’s truly excellent “Shampoo” and played two rounds of Scrabble.

I used to be really good at that game about ten years ago, but something happened to me in the intervening years — I might be tempted to blame the Internet — and my girlfriend handily beat me two times in a row. All the same, I really enjoy Scrabble, and it seems odd to me that it hasn’t been properly translated into an online version. Its simplicity makes it seem pretty well-suited for net play, but after some cursory searching, I could only find a fairly kludgy Java-based approximation called “Word Biz” (Windows only) and a knock-off at Yahoo! Games called Literati.