Game Preview: Qwirkle Cubes

By W. Eric Martin
February 15, 2009

Designer: Susan McKinley Ross
Publisher: MindWare
Players: 2-4
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 45 minutes
Release Date: March 2009
Link:

I’ve made no secret of my enjoyment of Qwirkle, starting with a review in March 2007, expanding on those thoughts with a Game of the Year post that April, and continuing to push it to the table since that time. After 110+ plays, I still enjoy Qwirkle and want to play more as it’s easy to explain, plays quickly, offers interesting hand-management challenges, and has gone over well with everyone that I’ve taught the game to, both gamers and non-gamers alike.

Qwirkle has found plenty of love from other gamers as well, so it’s no surprise that a sequel of sorts is appearing from MindWare. Says designer Susan McKinley Ross, “I’d been thinking about different ways of playing Qwirkle, but I didn’t really start making prototypes until MindWare approached me about a sequel. Most of the time I design toys, not games, and I often design variations of my toys, so it was natural that I’d want to play with the Qwirkle theme.”

The toy-like nature of Qwirkle has been apparent to me from the first playings, and I’ve also fiddled with variations, such as basing the game on the number five or seven instead of six and playing Inverse Qwirkle, which reverses the normal placement rules. The pieces of the game are so basic that they can be used as building blocks for parts of another game or, well, actual building blocks similar to those given to children.

Given that open nature of the game, Ross said that she approached the idea of a sequel by making basic prototypes of number of concepts. “I work best when I just dive in and make something and start playing it to see whether it works,” she says. “If I worry too much at the beginning, it’s paralyzing. My process is to make it, try it, fix it, try it again, fix it, try it again and so forth. It can be a slow process, as I tend to solve only one problem each version of the game, but it’s a good way for me to work. And I always play my games against myself numerous times before I let anyone else play them. I’m extremely nervous when people play my games, so I like to work out the worst problems by myself.”

“I try not to invest too much time in my first prototype because it’s too early to know what will work,” Ross continues. “So I make the simplest prototype that I can, and if I like the game, I’ll eventually invest more time in the prototype. I made 4 or 5 simple prototypes of possible Qwirkle sequels. I played all the prototypes and right away I narrowed it down to two possibilities. After a few more plays, the dice one seemed the most interesting.”

95% Similar

The “dice one” is what evolved into Qwirkle Cubes. Anyone who has played Qwirkle will find this new game similar to the original: Players have six cubes in their hand, each a single color with six different symbols on the faces of the cube, and on a turn a player adds one or more cubes to the board layout, with all of the cubes being added matching in symbol or color amongst themselves, while also matching the cubes they’re being placed next to. Symbols and colors cannot be repeated in a line. A player scores one point for each cube in a line created or added to on a turn, with a bonus of six points for creating a line of six cubes. Players refill their hands to six after each turn, rolling their newly acquired cubes, and the game ends when a player runs out of cubes.

The differences between Qwirkle and Qwirkle Cubes are twofold:

1. A player’s cubes can be seen by all players, which means that you now know whether another player can or cannot complete a row that you tee up by placing five cubes in it.

2. At the start of your turn, you can reroll any number of cubes in your hand before placing cubes on the board. This option gives you the ability to roll the cubes needed to complete a line of six or merely give you more options by (possibly) rolling away duplicates.

Asked why a player might choose one form of the game over another, Ross says, “In my playtesting, I found that gamers had a slight preference for Qwirkle Cubes. I think they liked the increased decision-making. Casual gamers seemed to like Qwirkle Cubes about the same as Qwirkle because they enjoyed the dice-rolling without worrying too much about the increased decision-making.”

First impression, by W. Eric Martin

Version played: Prototype
Times played: Thrice, with three and four players

Qwirkle Cubes is so similar to Qwirkle that it’s easy to dismiss the former as an unneeded intrusion in the gaming pantheon. Why mess with the clean lines and smooth play of the original by adding open hands, which can increase playing time as players crane back and forth over the possibilities of others, as well as the additional luck of die-rolling?

In practice, the open hands didn’t add much to the playing time, but any lengthening of the game due to wandering eyes would likely have been balanced by Qwirkle Cubes having fewer pieces than the original game, thereby serving to bring about the end of the game more quickly.

A far bigger change, however, involved the creation of the board during play. In Qwirkle, as in Scrabble and Ingenious, a big part of the game is controlling the space in which pieces are played. You hoard potential scoring combinations, hoping to draw additional matching pieces or play off existing pieces in order to score multiple lines at once, while at the same time trying to close down potential scoring areas that other players might use. The colors and symbols are balanced in Qwirkle, so they’re effectively interchangable. With their number being fixed, you can count out which pieces remain to be played and identify when a potential scoring situation is really nothing of the kind.

That’s not the case in Qwirkle Cubes as while the number of cubes of each color is fixed, every cube has the potential to be every symbol. As a result, we saw a greater concentration of “towns” during our three test games, towns being areas of a single color or symbol. In practice, a player might hold two of a symbol at the start of his turn and roll his remaining cubes to try to find more. Once a mini-town starts to develop, even if the board has only a single line of a symbol jutting out peninsularly, other players are encouraged to roll for this symbol, which causes towns – and scores – to explode quickly, with the game potentially devolving into a contest to see who can roll the most of a certain symbol.

Interestingly, my first games of Ingenious involved a similar style of play, as players would lay similarly-colored tiles next to one another again and again – even though doing so set up even larger scores for opponents, with the whole process snowballing until all players maxed out on a color or the color pool drifted into the edges of the gameboard. Over time, this playing style diminished, with players learning to cut opponents out of further growth opportunities, and I imagine a similar change in playing style would develop over time in Qwirkle Cubes. The difficulty comes in recognizing that the giant towns and the emphasis on lucky rolls results from your playing style as much as the design of the game. If you don’t give opponents the implicit encouragement to make those rolls, then they’ll head in a different direction.

In the end, Qwirkle Cubes is interesting mostly as an experiment to see how Qwirkle might have looked through the looking glass, something I wrote about in December 2008 when discussing all the choices that designers make when bringing their games to life. It differs from the original, but not necessarily in ways that are good or bad – just different. As a result, players can now have those arguments about the Qwirkle line just as they do about the various flavors of Carcassonne and Catan: Which one is best? Which one shouldn’t exist? I prefer the fixed nature of the original as you can plan better for future turns and be rewarded for outguessing an opponent as to who has which tiles, but I can see a place for the new entry, even if only as an exercise tool for your hand.

(Note that the pictures show a prototype of the game, and the design of the finished product might differ. I suggested that the diamonds have a black central diamond to help you distinguish them from squares when looking across the table, but I have no idea how the published game will look.)

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