Game Review: CrossWise

By W. Eric Martin
March 25, 2009

Designers: Nicholas Cravotta and Rebecca Bleau
Publisher: MindWare
Players: 2 (see below)
Ages: 6+
Playing Time: 10-20 minutes
Rules Language: English, Spanish & French
Price: $25
Links:

Version played: Production copy
Times played: Eight

I’ve often thought of recording a soundfile of my wife and including it with reviews of certain games. The file would be short, maybe a second or two long, and consist of only two words, said in a somewhat half-perky, half-resigned tone:

“It’s okay.”

Meaning the game works, but it isn’t exciting. The components are decent, being neither gamer candy nor toxic and garish. You’d play the game without having your puppy or loved one threatened with harm, but a dozen other games would hit the table before it if you had a choice. It’s another game in the flood of titles released each year, a source of some amusement for those who play, a great introductory game for kids being weaned from memory games, but nothing exciting enough that others will chase it down once it falls out of print in a year or two.

Every Game Should Have Big Chunky Wood Tiles

CrossWise superficially resembles Qwirkle, MindWare’s most successful title, in that it contains a few dozen painted wood tiles, with seven each of six different symbol tiles and six each of three different action tiles. The game also includes a scorepad and a gameboard wrapped on only one side, which leads to a bit of warping once the board is exposed to the elements.

Players start with four tiles in hand and take turns playing one tile – or two if you played “play two tiles” on the previous turn – on the intersection points of a 6x6 grid. Your goal is to create scoring combinations along your set of lines; one player scores vertically, the other horizontally. Scoring combinations are 3- to 6-of-a-kind, two or three pair, two triplets, or one of each symbol with points ranging from 2 to 10. The game ends when the grid is full, and the player with the most points wins.

The tempo of draw-and-place, draw-and-place is broken by the action tiles, the aforementioned “play two” as well as “move one tile” and “swap two tiles.” If you are an experienced gamer or have an innate feel of abstract strategy games, you might think that the ideal hand would be three action tiles and one symbol tile so that the other player can do all the work of filling the board, after which you move things around to your advantage. In practice that’s been the winning strategy. In the five games for which I recorded tile distribution, the winner always had more action tiles than the loser, and the more lopsided the ratio, the greater the margin of victory.

The “swap two tiles” action has proved particularly strong. If you draw more of these than the opponent, you can sit on them until you need to undo whatever action she takes. You won’t necessarily know that you’ve drawn more until the end of the game nears, but once you’re aware of the surplus, you know that the advantage has fallen on your side of the court.

Training Wheels

Given the power of its action tiles, CrossWise would best serve as an introduction to strategy games for those who have yet to experience them or those who find them threatening. The colorful tiles make the game look bright and easy, and the game play matches that look. You can shoot for the 10 point “one of each symbol” goal, then have your total for that row reduced to nothing when the opponent swaps out a single tile. You can trade swaps and moves back and forth as the board nears completion, each of you trying to time the final play in your favor, but the game shifts so quickly that such strategy is rarely carried out as you hoped.

A note on the number of players: While the box lists CrossWise as being for two or four players, the four-player game consists only of putting players on teams and playing the game as previously described.

Want to try CrossWise for yourself? Head to BGN’s Games for the Animals page to see whether it’s still available!

Comments:

< Back Home