Qwixx
My pre-teen is doing the thing that pre-teens do, where she often doesn't want to talk to us, and lashes out at us frequently.
I've worked with youth for years, and I knew these days were coming, but it still stinks.
Board and card games, though, have given my kid and I a daily point of connection - 30 minutes to an hour of time together every night where she sees me as someone who’s fun to hang out with, instead of being the 40 year old demon who's here to sap away all of her joy.
She and I go through phases of games with which she’s obsessed. Point Salad, Zombie Dice, Abandon All Artichokes, and Bob Ross: The Art of Chill (great game, I'm 100% serious) have been obsessions over the last year.
But I created a monster a few months ago when I introduced her to Qwixx.
Qwixx is a game in one of my favorite gaming genres: roll-and-write. These games are exactly what they sound like: someone rolls some dice, and then they (and sometimes everyone else as well) writes something on a sheet of paper related to the dice.
The most famous of these games is Yahtzee. Everyone knows Yahtzee. Yahtzee is great.
I have a set of enormous wooden dice that you use to play Yahtzee in the backyard. You throw them in the air and then dive away for cover, as one of those dice could knock you out.
In recent years, there have been a plethora of roll-and-write gems that have come out.
Here are a few of my faves:
Railroad Ink has players rolling dice with roads and railroad tracks printed on them, attempting to draw a functional transit system over seven rounds.
As you can see, I’m very bad at it.
Patchwork Doodle is a roll-and-write version of my favorite tetromino game, Patchwork. You get to color a quilt over the course of the game. Super fun.
Blokus Dice is a roll-and-write version of Blokus that functions very similarly to the regular game, except every player has a board in which they control every color.
That's Pretty Clever (aka Ganz Schon Clever) has a high learning curve, but if you're willing to learn it, the game has the coolest cascading bonuses I've seen in a game. You fill in one box, which lets you fill in another on a different side of the paper, which lets you fill in yet another. Every turn you feel powerful. Great game.
Finally, Welcome To Your Perfect Home is a game where you design a neighborhood, sort of like a zoomed-in version of SimCity. It's technically a flip-and-write where you flip cards instead of roll dice, but it's functionally the same.
Qwixx is this style of game, but one of (if not the) best of them. It's dead simple to learn. Players roll dice and try to fill in rows containing the numbers 2-12 (or 12-2 in some rows). Every box you check in a row gives you exponentially more points.
The twist is, once you fill in a number, you can never go back.
So if I fill in an 8 on the red row without having filled in the 6 or 7, I can never fill in the 6 or 7 for the rest of the game.
You get a ton of extra points if you can play the final number of a row, but in order to finish a row you need to have first checked off at least five boxes in that row.
So it's worth it to try and finish a row fast and get a bunch of extra points. However, to work fast, you're likely giving up a ton of points by skipping other numbers. So you might want to go slower.
BUT if you don't work fast, someone else might finish the row, giving them extra points instead of you.
This push-your-luck element to the game is juicy enough to engage gamers, but the game is simple enough to teach grandma and grandpa.
I've owned Qwixx for a few years now. I found it at Goodwill, but all of the dice were missing. I bought it anyway and Frankensteined a set of dice to keep in the box.1 None of them matched, but it worked fine. It just looked a little wonky.
And then, a few months ago, I found Qwixx Deluxe at Goodwill.
The deluxe version is the same, except the boards are dry-erase, and there are different kinds of game boards on each side. Also the dice are bigger and super high quality.
The box is large, though. I thought I'd hate that. One of the beautiful things about Qwixx is that it's small enough to throw in a purse.
But it turns out I don't mind it. I actually kind of love how the large box functions as a dice tray.
My kid wasn't interested in Qwixx until she saw the deluxe version.
And now we play it at minimum four times a day. Every day.
For months.
I swear that's not an exaggeration.
I would be sick of it, except for two things:
The game is lightning fast. But much more importantly,
My pre-teen and I hang out every night.
I'm not sick of Qwixx yet (surprisingly), but even if I was, I'm grateful to share time with my kid every night. I'm grateful for the 30-60 minutes where she doesn't hate me.
(If you have the original Qwixx and want to play with this different board, you can download it here. There’s also an abomination of a board on the same page. Play with that if you want to hurt your brain.)
How's about another contest? On Sunday I'll randomly pick one of my subscribers who will win my old Frankensteined copy of Qwixx.
It looks weird but it plays perfectly. 🙂
If you're not subscribed, do it now and you'll be immediately entered to win.
“Um, actually, it’s Frankenstein’s monster.”