Clint Walker
United States
Mattoon
Illinois
-
And now a word in praise of Grandparents. When you're a little kid they get you great presents and feed you candy, and even when you're older they STILL find ways of making you feel like their special-little-grandchild.
Hell, even after getting my graduate degree last summer I STILL got a card with twenty dollars in it. Not too shabby.
And at some point, don't all those grandparents teach us a game or two. Sure they'll sit down to play Candy Land with us as tots, but on a long enough timeline they'll ask you to sidle up to the table to play one of THEIR games, most likely with some of their grandparent friends.
Oh the classics...speaking for myself that's how I learned dominoes, Uno (where my grandmother, god bless her, admonished me for taking the Lord's name in vain after she Wild Draw Four'd me), Yachtzee, and Cribbage. Ok, they didn't teach me Cribbage, but I loved playing with the board. I think I used it as some kind of prop for my G.I. Joes.
And that brings us to Rummikub. No, my grandparents never taught me this game. Truth be told, I didn't even realize it existed until about ten years ago when It was included as a game within my cherished "Hoyle Board Games" CD-ROM, where it was listed as "Rummy Tiles."
But I do know a few people who's grandparents DID teach them the game, including a friend who's Czech grandparents taught her when she was a child, and then, knowing my game playing hobbies, was astounded that I had never played before.
And that's how Rummikub entered my life. Maybe it hasn't entered yours yet...oh but sets are everywhere and who can resist all those tiles clacking around on the table?
Concept:
Rummikub is by and large just Rummy played with tiles kept in a rack as opposed to playing with cards, although those used to "draw and play" as a concept might be thrown a bit as in Rummikube you either draw OR you play.
Equipment:
Sets vary in terms of racks or cases or even bags to draw from, but you'll always get 106 tiles. That's the numbers 1-13 represented twice in four colors, plus two wild tiles, usually with that smiley moon face that's at once weirdly creepy and yet still as homey as a mug of cocoa and instantly identifiable as part of what Rummikub is.
Objective:
Like a card game, Rummikub can be played for points over a series of games, where you (depending on what rule-set you use) either gain or lose points based on the value of what you're still holding when someone "goes out." Or you can just play it as a one and done game, and when you consider just how mentally taxing a good game or Rummikub can be, what with it's sheer number and sequence overload, you might only play one game...at least before taking a break.
Game play:
Couldn't be more easy.
Each player has a rack holding their tiles secretly from everyone else.
On your turn you either
1. Take one or more tiles and play them to the table to form melds Rummy style, which is either done purely out of your own tiles or from adding to, splitting, or re-arrainging melds already on the table.
2. If you can't play, or don't want to, draw from the leftover tiles. If you get something you can play, or want to play, you must wait until the next turn.
The game ends when a player gets rid of their tiles.
Valid melds include sets of three or four of a kind, each number a different color) or a sequence of numbers all of the same color, with one being the lowest and 13 being the highest and terminating there (you're not allowed to loop around from 1 to 13, although I'm coming back to that).
The tricky part is your initial "lay down."
In one of the more wicked twists of the game, your first play to the table, before you can add to or modify anything else, must be a set or sets totalling thirty points or more. Which means unless you start the game with a bunch of double didgit tiles in your initial 14 tile draw, prepare to spend the first few turns doing nothing but drawing.
There are two wilds.
As mentioned, there are two wild tiles that be used to represent any number, although keep in mind that these can be "recovered' and picked back up off the board if a player can replace that wild with a tile that has the number being represented. The wild must then be immidiatly played back down on the board as part of another meld.
Being able to see the big picture is a plus.
On the surface, Rummikub is a simple game. Play tiles in sets or by building off of others until you run out. Sounds easy enough. Problem is, you are allowed to manipulate what's already on the table in the process of making your melds. This means you need to be able to spot long seqences than can be broken apart to free up numbers that you need elsewhere. Great Rummikub players are the ones who can enter that zen state where they can just look at all those numbers and then start flying around moving things around until poof, they win.
It's not impossible for someone, like myself -who stinks with having to unscramble numbers all over the place - to do well at this game though. I've been amazed at how after a few plays, your brain will sort of adjust to what you're asked to do. Have no fear, it can be done.
Like a lot of "old school" games, everyone plays a bit differently.
So house rules abound and unlike most games where I like to stay "on book," I enjoy mixing it up a bit with this one.
For instance my official rules from Pressman state there's a two minute timer rule where you only have two minutes to make a move, otherwise you have to draw. This is probably where the "fast-moving" claim on the game box comes from. And while i "get" the rule, it just makes the game a bit too pressure-filled at times.
And apparently Czech Bohiemians have several alternate rules they use, which the friend who taught me how to play informed me of, including allowing a player to play a "1" after the "13" in a sequence but dead-ending it there...meaning you couldn't play a sequence of 10-11-12-13-1-2. You'd have to stop at the one.
And then she dropped the BIG one on me. Imagine my surprise when, after spending a good week practicing my Rummikub skills for her arrival (she beat the living hell out of me the previous time, so much so that she often had to show me what melds I was missing on my own rack), she announced that her family sets the inital lay down at 50, not 30, because "30 is a baby's game." Just TRY playing it that way.
So yeah...Rummikub...
I've read some of the reviews already written here on the subject. Some I agreed with, in that it's a harder, more stressful game then you'd think...that with two players it's a bit more draw-heavy as not as many tiles are avaliable.
Some reviews made me laugh, including a few that seemed to start name dropping some Euro's that I've never heard of. I'm sure the references are applicable when doing so, but still, it's just hard for me to think of any such game when I know this being broken out in grandma's houses all over the nation.
As mentioned, Rummikub is a lot of thinking. One second you're frustrated because you're just stuck drawing tiles until you can lay down 30...or good god, 50...and then the next you're staring at a table full of numbers trying desperatly to figure out a way to break up that sone sequence just so you can pull a "4" out of it, and then figureing out where to stick all the excess tiles left over.
And even then, you'll always have that nagging feeling that you are losing or lost just because you had the right tiles all along but couldn't figure out how to restructure then into the ones already played.
And yet, it's one of those games i feel like you just have to have. It's appealing to play, and on a tactile level it's up there with dominoes and Scrabble in terms of games that you just cant help but fiddle with the pieces. And when you DO win a game, against someone who's really great at it, you'll feel like you accomplished something.
This review is dedicated to grandparents worldwide, and to Rachel, who taught me the "boho" rules for the game, and got me a set for Christmas.
-
Rob Arcangeli
England
Manchester
Greater Manchester
-
Great review  I was playing Rummikubs with my Gran this Christmas!
-
Rudy Riot
United States
California
-
Rummikub is the first game my fiancee and I played together I had never played it even though I'd been playing board games for a long time, and she introduced it to me. It's an amazing game, we still really love it even though I've been able to get her into a wide range of other games. Now we mostly just play the Android app called RummyFight which is pretty good. A little clunky but it satisfies are rummikub cravings.
-
Edward Kendrick
United Kingdom
Redditch
Worcs
-
I remember about 10 years ago I was on a cycling holiday in North Germany with my 15-year-old son, and one night we reached the city of Kiel and stopped in the Youth Hostel. (Next day we cycled along the bank of the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the Elbe, but that isn't what I was going to say ...)
We were wandering around the slightly seedy area near to the YH trying to find a bar that also did meals, and found several that didn't. But in every one there was a clientele of Turkish men, all playing Rummikub! And the playing style was amazing - they had a maximum allowed thinking time of about half a second. One guy would play, then the next would either snarl in frustration and take a tile, or would start switching tiles around with both hands, and then almost before he'd finished the next guy would be at it.
After we'd been to the third place James remarked that they sure didn't play like Grandma.
-
Was George Orwell an Optimist?
United States
Corvallis
Oregon
-
My wife's parents, who are also Czech, introduced us to Rummikub Rummy Dice Game. Also an entertaining game.
-
-
The title of this post is so ridiculously true. My Grandmother just passed away recently and one of the memories of her that I will cherish is playing Rummikub with her, my mom, brother and all my cousins (she had the version called Rummy-O II by Cardinal which there are a few pictures of on BGG; same exact game with a different name). So when going to Grandma's apartment it was always Rummy-O, Booby Trap, Candy Land, Checkers, Chinese Checkers and any of a number of card games. I'm pretty sure it was she who planted the board game seed in me and I know very well it's her who gave me my life long love of poker. Over the years the games we played with family got a bit fancier but we could always pull out Rummy-O for some good times.
-
|
|
