As I was growing up, Scrabble was a favorite game of mine. My mom and I would sit for hours trying to out think each other with large uncommon words. I held my own, but honestly as a teen, my vocabulary arsenal wasn’t quite the level of my mom’s. Although I proudly won several games there’s no tellin’ if she let me win. My daughters are now my game playing buddies. We’ve played Scrabble a time or two, however, they aren’t able to challenge me yet. When I found out about the new word game Kerflip, a quick paced, simple anagram game for children and adults, I couldn’t wait to play! Creative Foundry brings the competition back to family game night! Kerflip! is for 2-4 players, ages 8 and up, and is available for $24.99
Kerflip met my expectations. My girls were able to play along side of me with ease and it was fun!! Here’s how you play: each player is given a timer and selects a certain number of tiles from a bag (based on how many people are playing). All tiles are dropped onto the gameboard at the same time and flipped to their ivory colored side. Once all tiles are flipped, players start calling words. The first player to call a word, flips over their timer and the rest of the players have that much time to find their words. As the second person calls a word they flip their timer and play continues for the remaining players until either time runs out from the last flipped timer or the last person calls a word. At this point scoring begins. Player one puts their word together and gets 10 points for every ivory tile, then flips those tiles to their orange side.
Scoring continues for the rest of the players words, each ivory worth 10 and orange worth 5. When scoring is over you move to the next round all rounds are complete when there are no longer enough tiles in the bag for everyone to play. What makes this game so family friendly is that a child can easily find a three letter word in the mix and shout it out before their parent, which means they have a great shot at winning. I found myself looking for larger words, which took a little longer and often resulted in re-using some of their letters reducing my score. Each round moved quickly, so there was no loss of attention on my 3rd and 6th grade daughters part.
The whole game was finished in about 10-15 minutes. Kerflip is now my youngest daughters favorite game!! A feature of the game I adore, is that all tiles played on the gameboard are swept into little slots at the front of the board after each round when all the rounds are finished, the tiles which are now under the board, slide into a box tip the game box up to shake the rest of the tiles in and now you simply take the box out and dump them back into the tile bag for the next time you play! Talk about easy clean-up!
