Qwirkle Flex

Susan McKinlay Ross' Qwirkle was first published by Mindware in 2006. It's an abstract strategy game played with 108 wooden blocks displaying six different shapes in six different colours (three copies of each). You play them to a shared tableau so that a tile is placed orthogonally adjacent to another with which it shares either shape or colour. The lines of tiles can crisscross, and, as in Scrabble (Hasbro) players score for all the lines to which they add. It's a game with simple rules but hidden depth, so it has the merit of being equally playable by casual and 'serious' gamers. As a result, Qwirkle has proved to be highly successful. It's won the Spiel des Jahres award, sold millions of copies, gone through numerous editions and spawned a number of variants. For Qwirkle Flex (Schmidt Spiele), veteran game designer Reiner Znizia has been added to the credits, so this is surely more than a mere revamp of the original game...

That said, the difference is really only in the tile backgrounds. Qwirkle Flex uses the same six shapes in six colours but whereas in Qwirkle all 108 tile backgrounds were black, in Qwirkle Flex a third are black, a third white and a third have a split back and white background. You can ignore the backgrounds and just play regular Qwirkle with the Flex tiles but if you play with the Flex rules you additionally score for diagonal lines you create where the background colour matches.

Tho' Qwirkle Flex is very very similar to the original game, the ability to score for matching background diagonals adds significantly to the opportunity for thoughtful placement. Note too that the scoring for background diagonals extends to the Qwirkle bonuses. In the regular game, you score a bonus 6 points for a line that contains all six shapes or the same shape in all six colours but in Qwirkle Flex there's additionally a 6-point bonus any time you complete a six-tile diagonal all in black or all in white.

You can amass relatively high scores with just a couple of well-placed tiles, so, just as in competitive games of Scrabble, players need to ensure they aren't gifting generous scoring opportunities to an opponent. It's not a tactic we'd recommend in a three- or four-player game but if you're playing Qwirkle Flex as a two-player head to head you might deliberately play fewer tiles than you could, holding onto a tile to play it on your next turn so that you can score for the same line a second time...

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