Konexi - The gravity defying word game.

We are word game people. We love a good game of Boggle, Big Boggle really and not just that little 4x4 square. OK, mostly the adults and maybe just because we are a little too competitive for the boys to join in. We have recently been playing Scramble with Friends on our phones - pretty addicting.  (If you want to play with either one of us, we are up for new challengers.)

For Christmas we received Konexi - the Premium Edition. The boys and I played it for the first time today. My younger son liked it a lot. The game combines building with letters and making words. I think he liked the building with the letters the best. We played by the rules that were in the package.

We had a pretty good time playing the game. It's a very pretty game and stores well. The letters are fun with all of their notches in them. We played about four rounds in-between some other school subjects today. The rounds were pretty short. We found the game challenging and interesting. Though, I don't see this surpassing Boggle any time soon as the word game of choice.

There is only one of each letter of the alphabet so the words that can be created are limited. At the beginning of the game, the letters are randomly placed in a circle. On your turn, you roll the dice to move the marker between two letters. You get to choose between one of the letters and add it to the existing letter structure.  It's mostly luck on what letters are added to the structure, unless you roll the option to pick any available letter. In the course of our playing, we had only one 5 letter word and lots of three letter words. We were not able to get our structures very tall so the possibility of making long words consistently seems rare. Making three and four letter words out of difficult letters may get a little tedious. (Our structures weren't as adventurous as the picture on the box and the order of our letters generally was a bit more difficult I X Z V don't make too many words, especially since the I was the first letter.)

My competitive nine year old spent a long time on his turn trying to come up with the longest word that he could and spent most of his time trying to make up words. I was getting bored waiting for him and said that he couldn't suggest a word out loud unless he could use it in a sentence. He wanted to win and so wasn't contented with a three letter word. You get one point for every letter in your word. I think it may be better to have some letters worth more points like in Scrabble. As an example, mix is worth more points than pat. When there is only one of each letter, that may not really make any sense. I have the same issue with Bananagrams too.

In summary, we will play Konexi again. I appreciate this as a thoughtful gift to a game playing family. You never know when you will find a jewel of a game though this wasn't it for us. I'll let you know if we come up with some good rules to make the game better for our family.

Did you get any new fun games?