Ten years ago, I found the game Qwixx at a game shop in Seattle. The bright colors on the box sucked me in. It is the perfect mix of strategy and luck, and it has a ton of replay value. It’s a seriously great game.

They have been making a bunch of expansions for it (especially in Europe), and me and my buddy Chris Bakke found a version where the colors are all scrambled around. It’s called “qwixx mixx.” and it looks like this:

The color of each space corresponds to a dice color, and in this version, instead of closing out a “row” you close out a “color.” (Full rules for these boards are available here) It’s a fun wrinkle, and we started talking about what OTHER ways you could reconfigure the colors of the board. Like, why can’t you play with a board that looks like this?:

Or this one:

I ended up using ppt and making a bunch of the patterns that we talked about. I printed them on cardstock, and laminated the fronts, so we could use them with dry erase markers. If you print them from the pdf (or “2 slides per page from the ppt) they are the perfect size to fit in the box that comes with the game. Now when we play, we start by drawing a board at random from the deck of 12 or so boards that we created. Your board doesn’t match your opponents, but the probabilities are similar (or the same) and it makes every game a little different. I love the added variety, and because all this fits in the little box, it’s a game that Emily and I bring with us whenever we go anywhere.

Also, the best image of a qwixx board that I was able to find at the time is in dutch, so as an added punishment for taking a strike you have to try to pronounce “Elke mislukte worp.”