If you’re in my Facebook group, you’ve probably heard me talk about, and seen the pictures of Quiddler. Quiddler is one of our favorite, and go to games. It’s a language arts game, and even I am surprised by how much we learn and reinforce each time we play. If you’re looking for a super fun game, and one that teaches spelling, literacy, dictionary skills, parts of speech, suffixes, prefixes, abbreviations, and math if they keep score, this is your game. Get it here now on Amazon!
Quiddler: How do you play?
Quiddler is one of those games that is easy to pick up and just start playing. (I love those kind of games!). It’s an 8 round game. The first round each person is dealt 3 cards. In the second round each person gets 4 cards, 3rd round you get 5 cards etc until you get to the 8th round and each person gets 10 cards.
Once you’ve got your cards you start trying to make words out of the letters in your hand. Oh yeah, the cards in Quiddler have letters instead of numbers on them. 🙂 When it’s your turn you draw a card and here’s where it gets tricky. The goal of each round is to create words and lay them down. To lay down your hand you have to use all your cards, including having 1 to discard. Until you can use ALL your cards… you can’t lay anything down. If you have a word, draw a card, and have 2 cards that aren’t part of a word, you can’t lay down yet… because you have an extra unused card. It’s the next person’s turn.
You keep drawing cards at the beginning of your turn until someone lays down, using all their cards with one to discard. When this happens the other players draw their last card and lay down what they can, and discard one card. If you have extra cards that you couldn’t use in words… you have to subtract the total of all your extra cards from your score.
You tell your score to the scorekeeper and they write it down. The person with the highest score after round 8 is the winner. Some rounds can get LONG and exciting. 🙂 We had a 4th round go on forever recently… we both ended up with 9 words when we finally could lay down. 🙂 Those kind of rounds I find really fun.
There aren’t many rules, other than you can’t use prefixes, suffixes or abbreviations. You also need to make your own house rules. One day I wanted to use Fe as a word. She looked it up and saw it was a symbol and decided that we couldn’t use symbols in the game. It was all fine and good until in a later game she had Au and it was a no go for her. Bwa ha ha ha. 😀 I suggest you determine what kind of dictionary you’re going to use before you start… and then agree the dictionary rules. 🙂 We use my phone and just keep it open on the table so it’s there when someone needs to look up a word. My kiddo is THE MASTER of looking up words to see if random letters she’s holding are actually words. We’ve learned so much vocabulary from her doing this. When she looks up the words she also ends up learning what part of speech they are, and the definitions, because I often say, “NO WAY… what’s that mean?!” or, “Really?! Is that a real word? What part of speech is it?” 😉 Now she just tells me all that information every time she lays down with a word I’m not familiar with or that she’s looked up.
Last week we learned clew, (she looked that one up for me! Thank you Hanna!! I ended up winning that round) lee, and fen. Who knew?!
We learn so much every time we play this game, and the best part, we have so much fun playing it. It’s pretty much the game Hanna knows she can ask if I want to play and I never say no, which is saying a lot! It’s made by the same people who make the game SET, which we also love. I also love Quiddler because it’s small and mobile. It doesn’t take up much room to carry or play. We took it with us yesterday and played while waiting on my car to get a new windshield at Safelite. There was just a small table next to the chairs, but it was more than enough room to play. It entertained us quite well until my car was finished.
Quiddler is a great game for kids who aren’t in love with language arts… they’ll never even know they’re “learning”. 🙂 If you have younger kids you can help them at the end of the round, find more words they might not have known. It’s rated for kids 8 and up, and I’d say that’s about right. It takes some doing to piece together the words out of letters in your hand. You can also play alone, or with up to 8 players. I also like that it’s a pretty cheap game, around $10. When you’re used to buying 20-40 dollar games, a 10 dollar game is nice. 🙂
You can also get a set with the game and a Quiddler dictionary. I didn’t see that when we bought our game or I would have totally bought the set. You can also pick up sets of Quiddler and SET. You’ll probably end up getting both if you like games… so go ahead and just get the set. 🙂
