Game Salute

Word games are often time consuming affairs—the kind of game where you either find an almost maniacal fascination with anagrams or where you must carry on an extended conversation with your fellow competitors as each player grinds through endless permutations of letters and point combinations. Don’t get me wrong. I love thoughtful word games but there are times when I want a full game to be over in the time it takes to finish one round of Scrabble.

Games like Boggle, Bananagrams, and Word on the Street are good examples of fast paced word games.

To this category of word game I wish to introduce the Major Fun Award winning game of Kerflip!

In many ways, Kerflip! is like a puckish and caffeinated child of Scrabble and Boggle. Players draw letter tiles from a bag and then simultaneously drop them on the game board. The players then look for words created by the letters. When you call out a word you can’t change your mind so you have to make sure it’s a good one. But you also have to be fast. The first players to call out words have a distinct advantage when it comes to scoring. If someone is taking too long, the game comes with a 15 second timer which may be deployed to speed things along.

It’s like a cattle prod in the shape of an hour-glass.

There are many quirky elements to scoring but a large part of it boils down to the tiles. The letter tiles are double-sided: one side is whit and the other side is orange. After players drop their tiles onto the game board they must flip any orange tiles to the white side. Once all players have called out their words, scoring starts with the fastest player. That speller scores 10 points per white tile and flips any tiles from his or her word to the orange side. The next player scores 5 points per orange tile and 10 per any white tile, flipping the white to orange as they are used.

This mechanic rewards speed AND word length. It also is a great way to apply pressure to the combatants. For the most part the players race each other. The timer is only needed for that last poor sucker who thinks he can calmly sift through all the letters for that killer word (er… he or she… it’s not like it ever happened to me…)

Orange tiles are removed from the game and any unused white tiles are returned to the bag. The game is over when the bag does not contain enough tiles for each player to draw.

Like I mentioned before there are other scoring rules that I won’t go into here. They are designed to keep the game fast paced and the score always in doubt because some points are kept concealed until the end of the game.

The game is beautifully designed, and the box is a lesson in game utility. The game board fits inside the box to easily contain the tiles. Clean-up is especially ingenious. Used orange tiles are pushed into two openings in the box. At the end of the game, you simply tilt the box up and the tiles slide into a waiting cup so you can simply pour them back into the bag.

It’s fast. It’s addictive. It’s elegant.

It’s Major Fun.

2-4 players. Ages 8+

We’re back!! After a spring hiatus we have a ton of games lined up. So let’s kick it off with a great card game from our friends at Game Salute…

There are many many ways to play Duco. This is not to say that the game doesn’t come with rules. It also doesn’t mean that the game is like an empty box that your kids will play with more than the toy that came in it. No, I mean that the game literally comes with many sets of rules all based off of a simple set of mechanics. Once you learn the basic mechanics there is lots of fun to be had.

But don’t be in a hurry. The basic rules are fun on their own.

At its heart, Duco is a tiling game. Players take turns placing cards in a grid so that the sides of the cards match up with the cards already in play. The better your cards match, the better your score.

So how to make (or lose in the case of the Bard) a winning match? The trick is in the cards.

There are 75 cards in the game. Each card is divided into nine squares. The center square contains the Duco logo and a color (this is used in some of the variations but not the basic game). The outer eight squares contain a variety of shapes (circles, crescents, stars, triangles, squares, and wild) in a variety of colors (red, blue, green, yellow, black, and rainbow). The wild shapes can be any of the other shapes while the rainbow can be used for any color. A match is determined by placing a card next to a card on the table. If the three boxes have the same shape OR color as the boxes in the other card, the player has a match and scores points: same shape OR same color = 1 point; same shape AND same color = 2 points.

The game ends when one player reaches 50 points.

This is a great social game as well as an engaging solitaire. A restaurant game for when you are waiting for your entrees to arrive. You can always score and sometimes you find a place where your card scores on two or more sides. Those moments when you discover a multi-sided match are very satisfying. Almost embarrassingly so. It’s fun but after a while you will want more.

And here’s where the game just keeps on giving. Duco suggests seven distinct variations that each have their own unique strategies and styles. I won’t go into them all here, but my favorite was the one they called Stress. This is a speed variation in which play occurs simultaneously. Each player has 10 cards. The first one to finish counts down from 30 and then everyone must stop. Scoring occurs at the end and unplaced cards are unscored. In this variation, the middle color is important because it identifies each player when it comes time to score.

The speed and the matching and the messing with other people. Definitely Major Fun.

This is like a Swiss army knife of tiling games. Handy in so many situations. It does require a decent amount of space to play, but there are so many ways to play that you will want to keep this around for those down moments when it’s important to keep your friends or kids occupied.

I would actually forget the thing I was waiting for and keep playing.

1-5 players. Ages 6+