Qwirkle Travel

Qwirkle Travel provides you with all the fun of Qwirkle, in a travel-friendly package! The original Qwirkle came out in 2006 to great esteem. Susan McKinley Ross’s design went on to take home the Spiel des Jahres award. Previous winners of the SdJ include Azul, Ticket To Ride, Carcassonne and Kingdomino, to name a few. Qwirkle, placed among them, then, sits in high regard…

The aim of Qwirkle Travel remains the same as regular Qwirkle. There’s 108 wooden blocks. There’s six different shapes (square, circle, star, and so on), and each shape comes in six different colours. Each player starts with a secret hand of six blocks, which they draw blind from a bag. On your turn, you can play blocks from your hand into the communal layout. They have to be into the same row/column, and all must either be different colours, or different shapes (not both).

The layout sprawls over the game’s duration, much like a crossword, or a Scrabble board. And, like Scrabble, if you place blocks next to other blocks, you can score multiple rows and columns. You score points on a basis of how many blocks there are in the row/column(s) in which you placed. This can add up fast. (Especially if the blocks you placed contribute to multiple rows and columns due to handy adjacency!) If you place the sixth block in the row, you score 12 points, instead of six. At the end of your turn, you re-draw up to six block, picking from the bag.

Unlike Scrabble, there is no board. This is where Qwirkle works so well as a travel game. Instead of a drawstring bag, Qwirkle Travel comes with one made from durable material. It has a zip, which means that the packaging for the game is that bag, itself. No box needed! The bag is smaller than a toiletries bag, so it’s that perfect ‘grab it and go’ size. This makes it so convenient to slip into airport hand luggage, or, say, a bag for the beach. And since all you need is a flat(-ish) surface, you can play Qwirkle anywhere you want to travel!

Player Count: 2-4 Players
Time: 45 minutes
Age: 6+