Game: Keesdrow

Image

emike — 2008-11-10T12:00:14+00:00

Keesdrow Deluxe

Image

ShaunGamer — 2008-10-11T20:39:50+00:00

Two deliveries arrive the same day . . . Chairs and a Boardgame . . . How long before we unpacked the chairs?

Thread: At Target

SVan — 2008-09-21T04:18:51+00:00

Saw this for $24.99 at Target. Nice to see more variety there.

Thread: Re: House Rule: no "bouncing" on letters

ShaunGamer — 2008-08-05T22:23:05+00:00

We quickly discovered this problem with the rules and have used the second suggestion, where only the final color of the peg is used as the multiplier. It has changed our games a lot!!

Thread: Re: Keesdrow - Like the Classic BOGGLE Only Different.

rootbeer — 2007-05-08T16:52:24+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely readable. Just a lot more colourful than your usual stuff.

Y'know, if you manage to filter out all of the colours (and lately, the random extra words he seems to throw in), Grognads is surprisingly lucid sometimes. Actually, one time I got a GeekMail from him that was completely normal-looking. That was a shocker.

Thread: Re: Keesdrow - Like the Classic BOGGLE Only Different.

Randy Cox — 2007-05-08T15:15:12+00:00

Yeah. I figured I could play around here. After all, I don't expect Keesdrow gets much traffic.

That said, I'd like to think that this is at least readable, something I can't say for grognads writing.

Thread: Re: Keesdrow - Like the Classic BOGGLE Only Different.

rootbeer — 2007-05-07T21:12:34+00:00

Trying on your new Grognads hat, Randy?

Thread: Keesdrow - Like the Classic BOGGLE Only Different.

Randy Cox — 2007-05-07T14:55:43+00:00

Quick overview of the rules and mechanics (well-covered elsewhere on this game's entry):

Put all the tiles on the game board (rules say to orient all the same direction, but I don't know why)
Players take turn finding words in the chains of letters (diagonally and orthogonally connected)
Player marks letters used with colored pegs
No peg means letter hasn't been used and it's worth the value stated on board (1 to 5)
[BGCOLOR=#009999]Green [/BGCOLOR]peg means letter has been used once and it's worth the value stated times two
[BGCOLOR=#FFFF00]Yellow [/BGCOLOR]peg means letter has been used twice and it's worth the value stated times three
[BGCOLOR=#FF0000]Red [/BGCOLOR]peg means letter has been used exactly three times and is not usable for remainder of the game
Player scores their word: sum of letters used (including incremental bonuses, meaning a letter used three times in the same word is worth six times the stated value)

Let's start with the name. I don't mind it as much as some people do. Saying "Keys - drow" (as in the word drown without the final letter) isn't so hard. But I always follow it up with "That's WORDSEEK spelled backwards" and the other person usually chuckles or sighs. Anyway, the name is a little too cutesy, but I can live with it.

The game itself reads like a classic. Put a bunch of letter tiles on the board and treat it as a huge Boggle board. Then, find words and put pegs in little holes next to the letters to indicate how many times each letter has been used (cumulatively for the game). Once a letter is used three times, it's off-limits to all players for the rest of the game. So far, so good. Sounds like fun. After all, Boggle is a blast and it's the same thing only much smaller.

Of course, there is one rule that's a little different from Boggle (other than the letter usage restriction)--you can sit on a letter and use it consecutively, like B-E-E-T with only three letter tlies or V-A-C-U-U-M with five letters. This, too, is acceptable as that could even be seen as just about the only lacking feature of Boggle. After all, a lot of words have double-letters in them and they're almost universally excluded when playing the old classic.

So, I figured, this must be a great game. Boggle is exciting and quick with its 4x4 grid so this will just be "Thinking Person's Boggle" what with its huge 16x16 grid (note that this is the 'deluxe' version--standard Keesdrow features only a 12x12 grid). But I was wrong. 256 letters is just too much to consume. I can look at a Boggle layout and frantically write for the entirity of the sand timer finding lots and lots of nifty little words in there. But in Keesdrow Deluxe, I see so many letters that I wonder where to start. So I end up looking at about a 4x4 section, evaluating good words. And my mental timer runs out (as I hate to inconvenience my fellow players by bogging down the flow of the game). So I settle for whatever I found in that little section, peg out my letters, and do the overly-complex scoring practices to tally my score. Instantly, I look up to other sections of the huge board and see other possibilities. This is truly a case of So Many Options, So Little Time (self-imposed time, though it may be).

But that's a problem. See, the rules make it sound like the sand timer was only thrown in as an afterthought; just in case Uncle Joe is ridiculously slow. Well, let me tell you, even people who want to play every game rapid-fire will be hard-pressed to keep this game moving along smartly without instituting the timer. But that, too, is a problem. The timer is 2-minutes long. In a four-player game, once you use up the 2-minutes, state your word, peg it out, and tally the score, it's a good ten minutes between your turns. I'm afraid that's just not going to cut it--too much downtime. And that's a shame, because I really like the concept.

There are a few options to save this game, however. One would be to reduce the board size down to standard sized Keesdrow. To do so, I guess I'd need to cut out a couple of thick cardboard strips to insert in the recessed gameboard so that the 12x12 tile grid would fit snuggly. Better yet, I could customize down to 10x10 or whatever seems to work best. Another option is to use a variant playing mode mentioned in the rules whereby each player gets a full 2-minutes to make as many words as they can. Of course, this turns it into sequential Boggle, with each player trying to make as many words as possible in a hurry, but with the fiddly pegging/scoring concept, the ability to have someone run away with the game is mitigated somewhat, as simply pegging and scoring takes considerable time. Even if you could see 50 words in two minutes, you'd find it difficult to get more than a half-dozen locked in (those tiny pegs are not easy to place accurately, and as you reuse letters, you keep pulling out the peg you just put in and replacing it with the next 'higher' colored peg). Finally, I guess you could do either of the above options and use a different-length timer, like maybe one minute. Maybe even the full 16x16 Keesdrow Deluxe board wouldn't be too painful with a one-minute (or less) timer.

So, to sum it up, I had high hopes for this game and, since I paid over $25 for it, I'll try to make it work. But a game should work out of the box and, sadly, this one comes up short.

Thread: Re: House Rule: no "bouncing" on letters

parkrrrr — 2007-04-29T20:59:03+00:00

The rules do explicitly state that it's 1x+2x+3x=6x. Turn #6 in the examples, the word GRASSES, uses the same S three times, scoring 2 points for the first use, 4 points for the second use, and 6 points for the third use.

Also, the "Game Strategies" section of the written rules says, "Identify words anywhere on the game board where you can use a letter more than once in the same word (See page 5, Turns #5-#8). Using an unused letter twice in the same word allows a player to score the single and double point values of that letter. Using an unused letter three times in the same word allows a player to score the single, double, and triple point values of that letter."

I'll see if I can find some people to try it with bouncing allowed but without increasing the score for a letter within the word and see which version we like better. I can say, though, that the idea that you can use the same instance of the same letter twice in a row seems counterintuitive to anyone who's ever played pretty much any other word-search game.

Thread: Re: House Rule: no "bouncing" on letters

Randy Cox — 2007-04-27T13:08:33+00:00

Now, I don't have my copy yet (it's been ordered), but from reading the write-ups here on BGG, it seems to me that a word like PUPPY should only count the 3 P's at 1x value each because at the beginning of the turn, there was no peg on the letter. I guess the rules book explains differently, but it would seem to me that you wouldn't get 3x the value of "P" for each of the three letters. It also doesn't seem right to give 1x the value for the first P, 2x for the next P, and 3x for the third P. By giving only 1x per instance, you tone down the scoring, but still allow a player to lock out a letter on a single word, which seems a reasonable strategy.

Do the rules explicitly state how to handle the 3 Ps in PUPPY? Is it 1x+2x+3x = 6x? 3x+3x+3x = 9x? Or 1x+1x+1x = 3x? The last of those options seems most reasonable to me.

Thread: Re: House Rule: no "bouncing" on letters

tonyfung1205 — 2007-04-24T18:52:16+00:00

I haven't owned this game yet, but I can understand your concern. However, I may suggest any scoring scheme to overcome the issue you addressed. A letter is allowed to be used mutliple times, but the multipler is not incremented for the scoring for this letter. Though the peg color keeps changing as per original rules. For example, 'B' in BABBLE will be score 1+1+1 = 3x rather than 6x. But a red peg is put on 'B' anyway.

This way, one can still tactically use the same letter multiple times, and no need to exclude double-letter spellings.

Hope this suggestion is helpful. I have no chance to test it.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:29:32+00:00

Teams to Steams to Streams. Red pegs show that letters have been used 3 times and are out of the game.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:27:15+00:00

Further into the game.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:26:12+00:00

Colose up after a few moves. Yellow peg shows that a letter has been used twice.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:24:30+00:00

Game after a few moves.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:24:04+00:00

Toilet!

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:23:37+00:00

Colored pegs for marking words.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:22:13+00:00

Board close up.

Image

KSensei — 2007-03-28T05:20:15+00:00

Board after set up.

Thread: House Rule: no "bouncing" on letters

parkrrrr — 2007-02-17T01:51:02+00:00

Within our first few games of Keesdrow, it became painfully obvious that there's a simple way to get 30 or more points on nearly every turn: search the board for places where you can spell a word like BABBLE, POPPY, or FLUFFY and get an easy 6x multiplier on the high-point-value letters. The game very quickly degenerated into a search for words with three- or four-point letters that could be used three times. (We never did manage to find FLUFFY and its minimum 39 points.)

To try to regain some of the strategy that disappeared from the game with this realization, we enacted a house rule: It's okay to use the same instance of a letter two or more times in a word, but each pair of such uses must be separated by at least one letter. There are still words in English that allow for the 6x multiplier (PANPIPE, BAOBAB, GOUGING, SYZYGY) but there aren't enough to ruin the game.

Under this rule, Turns 5, 6, 7, 9, 15, and 16 in the example game from the official rules could not be played. Turn 10 could still be played for the same score, but could not be scored in the order depicted.

Thread: Mini-Review: Surprisingly Refreshing and Fun!

JohnnyR — 2007-02-05T16:44:00+00:00

Have you ever gotten a gift that you thought you would hate but ended up enjoying it? This was the scenario over the weekend, when I received keesdrow as a gift. I took one look at it, and already had it pegged as a budget, sub-par knockoff of scrabble. Now, of all the “traditional board games” (Monopoly, Life, Scrabble, etc.) Scrabble is by far my favorite, but it hardly gets any play time when I have much more important games to play, like Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, Battlelore, etc. However, since this game was a gift, I felt inclined to at least try it out.

What I got was an amazingly fun, refreshing take on the scrabble theme. Also, the girlfriend really liked it, which instantly puts it on the very VERY short list of board games she likes. I’m not going to go into detail about the mechanics of the game, since the above review does that quite nicely. But I will say, if your looking for a good filler, and want to flex those vocab muscles, give this game a tru. You won’t regret it.

Thread: Keesdrow: Bad name, great game

rrc1230 — 2006-08-12T23:58:28+00:00

Keesdrow is cursed with a name I don’t like saying. I know it’s “wordseek” spelled backward, but really, it just doesn’t flow. But that’s about the only thing I don’t like about this game, which has become something of a minor obsession with me right now.

In Keesdrow, there are 64 two-sided wooden tiles, with four letters and point values on each side. You randomly place all the tiles on the game board, which is indented so they don’t slide around. Next to the game board you place a box of green, yellow and red pegs that is included. The game then begins, and it’s relatively simple: It’s a word search, and words can be in any direction and zigzag, much like Boggle.

The fun comes in the scoring system. The first time a letter is used, a green peg is placed in a hole next to the letter and a player scores face value. If the first player found the word “PUNS,” for instance, he’d score 11 points (P=4; U=3; N=2; S=2). However, the second time a specific letter is used, the points of the letter are doubled, and the player places a yellow peg next to the letter. If a letter is used for the third time, place a red peg next to it and score triple points. However, that specific letter is now out of play for the rest of the game. The instructions helpfully compare to the system to a stoplight: green, yellow, red, then stop. So if you followed the player that used “PUNS” by turning it into into “PUNTS,” the scoring would increase (P=8; U=6; N=4; T=2; S=4) to 24 points. If you then came back with "PANTS," the scoring would increase yet again (P=12; A=1; N=6; T=4; S=6) to 29 points. However, the "P," "N" and "S" would be out of the game, because they now have red pegs next to them.

There comes the challenge: Do I use that great word I found now, or hold out and hope that some of the letters will be used, so I can score double and triple points? It’s a neat little twist, and makes the game extremely competitive. You worry about moving high-scoring letters to yellow, because you know the next player will be able to score triple points if they take them to red. Unlike Boggle, individual letters also may be used more than once to form a word: My opponent managed to score 53 points late in the game by forming the word “STUBBY” and completely turned the game around.

Play can continue until players reach an agreed-upon point goal, or players can be given an equal number of turns and then scores are compared. We initially started playing to 100 points and then found we reached that quickly. Now, we’re playing to 300 points, which tends to last 45 minutes to an hour (the game comes with a sand timer, but we don’t use it).

With the clever twist of the scoring system, this game should have wide appeal -- even those who are not normally drawn to word games may enjoy it. Right now, this one is rarely leaving the table -- it's that much fun.