Game Review: Rummino!

By Nathan Beeler
October 31, 2009

Designer: Alauna Sallis
Publisher: Marina Games
Players: 2-6
Ages: 8+
Playing Time: 30 minutes
Rules Language: English
Links:

Version played: Comped review copy
Times played: Four times, twice with 3 players and twice with 2

By now everyone should know the great blunders in life as taught to us by Vizzini in The Princess Bride: “Never get involved in a land war in Asia,” and “never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” To that list I might have added “never forget to zip your fly before a job interview,” “never taunt someone who was held back one or more grades,” and “never agree to review a family game from a small publisher that has an exclamation mark in the title.”

The truth of these statements seemed self evident to me, and until I played Rummino! recently I would have sworn by all of them – but the real truth is that Rummino!, a family game from a small publisher boasting said exclamation mark, doesn’t exactly suck.

Okay, so it’s still not really my kind of game. At heart it’s primarily a low strategy, luck-driven way to pass the time. I don’t much care for Qwirkle either, the game that Rummino! wants desperately to grow up to be. The two games have a similar feel, but they differ in a few important ways.

Rummino! has tiles with five suits of pinochle card values on them (9-A), which players add to the board to sets of a given rank or to ordered runs in a suit (straight flushes). On one turn, a player may play as many of a suit or a rank as he chooses anywhere on the board, provided each tile is placed legally. Scoring is fairly simple, as players score for the lengths of any rows or columns they added to that round, with bonuses given out for completing sets or runs. Two blank wild cards are included in the game, presumably put there to ramp up the luck factor for that genuine family game feel.

The components of the game are passable overall as the tiles have a significant heft to them. The colors are mostly easy to distinguish, so while the pink and the red are fairly close in low light, the suit icons on the tiles help someone like me with partial color blindness tell them apart. The game comes with a sturdy tile drawing bag, which is a nice touch – but then it doesn’t include tile racks, which would have been an even nicer touch; the tiles are fairly thin and are wont to fall over and expose themselves to your opponents at the slightest touch or table bump. This happened a lot.

My experience playing Rummino! wasn’t nearly as excrutiating as I thought it might be, and while I wouldn’t suggest it over a known favorite, I can imagine playing it again someday. My friends had a similar mixed reaction to it. I played Rummino! with both gamers and non-gamers, and it definitely went over better with the non-gamers, who I have to assume are the target audience. (One non-gamer friend said he really enjoyed it and would happily take my copy when I was done reviewing it.)

One of my gamer friends complained about not being able to discard bad tiles and suggested that a game starting off with a perfect 6x5 grid was a degenerate situation that would break the game. He’s right, of course. Though it must be said that for the game to really play out that way would be nearly inconceivable…

Comments:

< Back Home