disclosure: we were sent the item mentioned for the purpose of review
Over the half-term holidays, we watched all of the Harry Potter films and I also took the opportunity to spend some time with my son enjoying word games with Harry Potter Lex-GO! The game is aimed at players aged 8 years and over and can be played with 2-4 players.
It’s no secret that my son is a very reluctant reader so I have to employ all sorts of tactics to help him with his spellings and vocabulary whilst he just thinks he’s having fun. The Harry Potter Lex-GO! set comes with 55 playing letter tiles including spell and polyjuice tiles.
To start the game you place all of the tiles face down on a table and each player takes 10 tiles as their hand, still keeping the tiles face down.
One player then shouts Lex-GO! and then everyone turns their tiles over and the race is on to make as many words as possible to get rid of all of your tiles. You can make words with your own tiles as well as attacking another player’s words by adding or replacing letter tiles to their words.
But be careful when you attack another player as you cannot change the order of the letters or reverse the word. It’s a quick-thinking game and a great way of helping children improve their vocabulary in a really fun way.
If you do replace tiles in your opponent’s words you have to keep them for your own set. You can also swap a tile with one in the draw pile but you must shout Swap as you do this and you cannot swap another tile until another player has. so a bit of strategic thinking is also required.
The first player to get rid of their tiles wins the round. The first player to win 5 rounds wins the game.
If you can spell Snitch then you automatically win the round. If you are lucky enough to hold the Polyjuice tile then you can nominate that tile to be any letter you like, and it remains that letter for the rest of the round.
There are 4 different spell tiles that can be discovered whilst enjoying word games with Harry Potter Lex-GO!
If you have the Expelliarmus spell tile you can disarm another player by messing up their tiles, the Depulso tile means you can banish one of your tiles from the round if you need to. The Revelio tile allows you to look at any number of tiles in the draw pile before selecting your swap and the Stupefy tile allows you to choose a player to close their eyes and count out loud for 10 seconds before they re-join the round (although that particular tile probably works best in a 4 player game. To simply the game you can use all of these spell tiles as Polyjuice tiles instead.
As well as playing the Harry Potter Lex-GO! game following the rules, we’ve also made up our own rules, and just made up as many words as we can together as well as linking words together like another well-known name word game.
You can also spend time enjoying word games with Harry Potter Lex-GO! when we are allowed to travel again. The tiles come in a fabric storage case which would be easy to put in your handbag or suitcase.
I’ve included my Amazon affiliate link (I do earn from qualifying purchases) for your reference below. There is also a Disney version of this game available too.