Friday Games: Konexi

My Mom gave me Konexi a few years ago.  She thought I could use it to practice spelling and reading with the kids.  I thought it looked like an interesting idea, and was willing to give that a try.

 

And then we played it with some friends.  You see Jeff balancing that letter on the other one.  Your goal is to add a letter to the stack without knocking down the rest, and to make a word.  You can use any letters you can connect to your letter in a straight line or web……  It doesn’t matter the order, but it takes some thinking.

See that, my word after adding the “A” was ‘stair.’  The longest word from that round was ‘comped.”  Unlike in scrabble you can add word endings to make a new word.  It’s actually encouraged.

 

When it’s your turn you roll the dice to find out where you are moving the marker to.  The marker can move clockwise or counter-clockwise.  That usually means you have a choice of 4 letters.  For example in the picture above she’s trying to decide between “v” and “l.”  To see which one would make the best word with the most letters.  You get points for how many letters in your word, there are no extra points for a letter being more difficult or anything like that.  It’s just letters.

This is the longest word possible in Konexi with no duplicate letters “uncopyrightable,” I don’t think you could get this word in a game, but I had fun building it just to see if it was possible.

 

Start with a stable letter.  A and V suck as starting letters because there’s not a lot of connection points, and the whole time it’ll be like it’s on a balance.

Add new letters slowly and with great patience.  New letters added change the balance point and it will shift how it’s laying.  If you add the letter slowly it will move over slowly.  Usually………

Don’t pound the table or hit it.  That will cause things to fall over, and we made it a house rule that whoever hit the table was the one who lost points.

By the same token, no sudden sounds.  One of the players thought it’d be funny to play the Mission Impossible theme just as someone was adding a letter.  He lost points when she knocked over something because it made her jump.

 

I think my kids will really enjoy this game in about 2 years.  Their reading and spelling will be up to a level they can think of words on their feet, and their dexterity will be high enough they’ll be able to play without being frustrated.