Qwirkle

Qwirkle is a remarkable little game: it's a light and simple tile-laying game for two to four players that anyone can learn in minutes, a game that has something of the feel of Scrabble without words. It's the kind of enjoyable and not-apparently-deep game that parents can play it with kids, and grandparents with grandkids. But when dedicated gamers play it head to head, the knives come out.

The plain but hefty wooden tiles in Qwirkle each show one of six symbols, in one of six colors; each of the 36 possible combinations appears three times in the tile mix. The rules are exceptionally simple: each turn, add one or more of your tiles to the layout on the table. The tiles you lay must be in a single line, and all rows and columns that your have added a tile to must be legal: they must either be all the same color or the same symbol, and the same tile cannot appear more than once. Your score for the turn is the number of tiles in all rows and columns you've extended, plus a bonus of six points if you've completed a line of six tiles.

It becomes immediately apparent that playing the fifth tile in a row is risky. But the risk is limited, as only three tiles in the mix will complete it, and it's often easy to neutralize a five-tile line by placing tiles that make playing the sixth illegal. As the game develops, four-tile rows start appearing, and your hand begins to fill with tiles that will earn you the bonus just as soon as you draw the sixth. Another emergent pattern is the point factory: an array of tiles that match by color in one direction and symbol in another, which gives many points to whoever has the tiles to add a row or column to it.
Soon play becomes very cagey and tactical. You play not just to score points, but to dump bad tiles, to shut down lines that you don't have the tiles to finish, to break a point factory that you can't use, or to set yourself up for the next turn. The big scores from the six-tile rows have a very strong influence on the game, but you can win without them. As more and more tiles hit the board, it becomes possible to play the odds meaningfully, and to infer what tiles your opponent has been hanging onto. Games can be decided by a point or two, or they can be huge blowouts.

It has one of my favorite qualities in a game: every time I've taught someone to play the game, the first thing he wants to do after the last tile is played is play again, because he's beginning to understand what he should have been doing. In fact, just writing this review makes me want to play it again, *right now*.

My only criticism of the game is that recording the scores every turn gets tedious in a game that can be 40 or 50 turns long. Some sort of scoring track would have been nice. But that's not much of a criticism.