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I play! Qwirkle edition

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Apparently I put down one tile for 17 points in this picture. But I don’t remember what I did exactly. Nor do I feel like figuring it out now.

Here’s a game that’s quite suitable for younger children but also adults.  Qwirkle is a tile game which one of my kids described as being “Scrabble for people who don’t know how to spell.”  You start with six tiles and players take turns to lay out connecting tiles in which either all the tiles are printed in the same color but with different shapes or all the tiles are printed with different colors but with the same shape.  No duplicates are allowed in a line.  Points are awarded per tile in a line.  If you complete a whole set (six tiles of all the same color but different shapes or six tiles of all different colors but the same shape), you are awarded an exta six points and the privilege of yelling “QWIRKLE!”  The yelling part may not be a part of the actual rules.  I may just happen to like saying Qwirkle.

Anyway, I’ve played the game with kids as young as 8 and they were able to catch on to the rules without any problems.  For the younger ones, I would just tell them to repeat “different colors, same shape or same color, different shapes” to themselves the first few times they put tiles down or whenever they were confused.  They caught on pretty quickly.

One of the older kids (5th grade?) caught on very quickly (he’s a very bright kid) and then proceeded to talk so much trash to me as he quickly pulled ahead at the beginning of the game when I was getting a lot of bad draws.  I proceeded to beat the snot out of him because he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of strategy and the art of blocking your opponent.  Poor kid.  But also…🍭.

I have the travel edition of the game which I believe is a quarter size of the normal edition.  I chose the travel edition mostly because of storage reasons.  The normal edition is a large box for a bag of tiles.  Meh.  But the normal version would be easier to play with when you play with four players or in bad lighting.  There was a lot of “what color is this?!?!” when my brother and I test played.  Neither of us is color blind, btw.

I play! Legendary Showdown edition

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Freaking Beeman

I’m sure you know that I’m already a big fan of Dr. McNinja.  Also of Girl Genius and Gunnerkirgg Court as well.  Well, lucky for me there’s a card game involving all of those comics.

Legendary Showdown, both the original Dr. McNinja’s Legendary Showdown and Legendary Showdown: Machines and Magic, is a card drafting/hand management game published by Killer Robot Games.  The original artists of all three comics provided the art for the cards.  Killer Robot Games kickstarted both games with the blessing of the artists.  I obviously supported both campaigns as I’m a big fan of all three webcomics.

Gameplay is pretty simple and goes by quickly.  You draft a hand of characters, which are shown to your opponents, and then a hand of modifiers, which are hidden, and then you go forth and do battle upon your opponents.  The character with the highest points after modifiers are played and shown wins the round.  You then proceed to play the next character in your hand.  Modifiers played on a character follow the character through the rounds.  Since gameplay and mechanics are the same for both games, you can mix the decks and have a legendary showdown in a McNinja/Girl Genius/Gunnerkrigg-verse.

The game is easy enough to teach younger kids and I think they could be entertained by some of the more ridiculous modifiers and characters, like Beeman up there.  But I think the finer details and even the more ridiculous details would be lost on people who aren’t familiar with the comics.  Such is the way of heavily themed games.  Not sure if I’ll try and introduce this game to the kids.  I think I might be the only one who would really appreciate and understand all the characters and modifiers.  Sadz.