Last weekend, Meghan and I were looking for something to do on Friday night. We decided to go to Ben Franklin’s and get a puzzle. While there, we also looked at some of the games, and we ended up picking up Quiddler. Aside from an odd name, Quiddler is billed as “the short word game”, and that it is.
The game consists of a deck of 118 cards, each labeled with a letter (A through Z) or two (QU, IN, ER, TH, and CL) and the point value for that letter. The goal of the game is to use these cards to create words, which are worth the total value of the cards. There are a total of seven hands played in which you try and make words, each providing more letters than the previous hand. The first hand starts with three cards, the second hand has four, and so on until the seventh hand which has ten cards. (For those who think in formulas, that’s x cards per hand, where x = the hand number + two.) By only being seven hands long, a typical game should last around half an hour, give or take.
Sure, there are some stipulations to how the game is played:
- Words have to be made of at least two cards, not just two letters (as the card IN would be a word).
- For every letter that isn’t used in a word, you lose the point value of the card. Your point value for a hand can never be less than zero, so you don’t have to worry about negative numbers.
- Word restrictions are much the same as Scrabble.
Meghan and I have played it a couple times, and it’s a quick alternative to Scrabble. The game cost us less than ten dollars, and is made by Set Enterprises, which makes a couple other card games, one of which, Xactika, caught my eye before I picked up Quiddler.
I’m curious as to what my brother would think of it, and have already excepted the fact that he’ll deem the game as “too easy” and before too long, when I play the game with him it will be in a form called Über-Quiddler, which will probably start with eight cards, minimum word length of three or four letters, increase cards by two each hand, and play until the last hand has thirty cards. Or something else equally ridiculous. We’ll also be playing Über-Scrabble at the same time too.
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