Qwordie

Qwordie is a crazy frankenstein creation of a quiz and a word game stitched together with a bizarre fixation on platypuses. Only slightly weird then.

In Qwordie the aim of the game is to try and collect enough letters on your stack to reach a certain hight  (depending on how long you want the game to take). But how do you do that, I hear you cry. Well, at the start of the game you draw 5 letter tiles and each turn you get the choice to either choose one letter tile from the communal pool (which starts at 15 tiles) and put it in to your hand. However, if there is nothing you want from the pool, then you can randomly take two tiles from the box, putting one into your hand and the other into the pool. The round ends when someone can spell from the letters in their hand an answer to question card that everyone is working towards. If the person correctly spells it, they can add all the letters they used to their stack, and you draw another question card. However, you keep your letter tiles, so even if you didn't win this question, you are more prepared for the next one.

So, Qwordie is definitely not a heavy game, it will probably only take 20 to 30 minutes and those you could play with little focus. Although, it does require some trivia knowledge to play, as the hard questions aren't necessarily easy. I do like how to you have the decision between whether you choose the safe but probably not best option of taking from the pool, but you could push your luck and try to get the tiles you really need but you risk getting nothing you need at all.

However, from all this, it makes the game just 'meh'. I mean it isn't amazingly fun, but if I was on a desert island I would play it. I think that that sentence describes the game as a whole, although I would suggest it to those who like trivia and things like that. I am going to give this game a 5/10 and urge you to spend your hard earned money on something just a bit more entertaining.

Magic the Gathering

I'm back! Bet you missed me. The torrential amounts of homework has (mostly) stopped and I can start writing these posts again and today I am going to review an incredibly popular collectible card game called… Magic the Gathering.

In Magic the Gathering, you are a planeswalker, a powerful mage that can travel the planes of existence, using the energy from the lands you go to, to power devastating spells. But life is not peaceful for a planeswalker and you find yourself frequently battling others like you. To emerge victors of these bloody fights, you must summon mythical creatures, cast gravity-defying spells and clash in a combat that only one of you can come out of.

This blog, I am not going to explain all the rules of Magic the Gathering because A I can't be bothered to, and B because I think that someone could explain it better anyway. So if you want the low down on how it works, go here to find out all the rules of this game.

Now, after you have read that article (or most of it anyway), it is time to discuss what I think about it. First things first, I have to say I love it, once you are playing, the rules are intuitive and flow easily. Although it can be hard at first to read all those rules, it makes sense afterwards.  I would suggest that you keep a computer connected device to search for the meanings of the key words that sometimes show up on the cards.

Personally, I find that this game has just enough bite to it, to make it not brain hurting from all the possibilities and variables that could come up, but a nice amount of strategy and tactics to make it a good thing to think about.

Two things that I love about this game that other people might be not bothered about, is the art and the story behind it. I mean, I could frame some of these cards and put them up on a wall to look at all day (although I'm not a massive fan of some of the older stuff). As well as this, if you like this kind of stuff (which I do) the story behind the cards is really cool and quite in-depth.

Now then, it is time to debate a real double-edged sword to this game… and that, is deck building. I personally love it, trying to figure out which cards would work really well together and testing your skills against the maker of the other deck. But, to make a deck all by yourself, you will need a lot of cards, and the requires investing money and time which some people will be unprepared to do. However, if you buy a pre made deck, you get two packs full of random cards, to customise the pre made deck you got, which allows you a taste of what deck building is like, but it doesn't give the full experience.

Another thing that is annoying is that Magic the Gathering is quite  reliant on luck, sometimes you will play an entire game, just drawing lands (the things that power your spells) or spells and no lands
(so you can't play the spells you do have). This means you basically spend the game doing nothing and watching as your opponent decimates you and you can do nothing about it. However, the games are short enough and the games detailed here are far enough apart to make it not a massive problem, but
still an annoyance.

 Overall, I think that Magic the Gathering is a really good game, but if you want to get the full depth and enjoyment out of it then be prepared to get your wallet out once or twice. A thing I would suggest  is that if you have a local game store then you can ask for a taster deck, which is 60 cards split in to two smaller decks for you to try out (that was how I first encountered Magic the Gathering). I think I would give this game a 8.5 out of 10 and suspect that I will like it a lot more, the more I play it.