Some games, you find out about when a friend tells you about it or brings over a copy. Others, you see highly ranked on a site like this one. Rumis? I discovered this game when I bought a couple bags of plastic pennies and nickels from an educational site, and I decided to look in a "Games" tab to see what they had. "It's Tetris in 3-D! I like Tetris!" It looks like it's regarded well enough, and I love my puzzle games, so I take a flyer on it and pick it up.

And I'm glad I did. Rumis is a board control game where it's best to give your opponents just enough space to take advantage of their moves. It's a game where you build structures along the lines of what the Incans built, and you can look in the book to see just why the Incans did build it. It's Tetris in three dimensions turned into a light board game. And it's a game where the loser(s) have something that can be knocked over at the end of the game without anything getting lost.

Setup

Setup is quick. Each player takes all 11 blocks (referred to in the game as stones) of a certain color--all unique shapes comprised of two, three, or four cubes put together. A building card is chosen, and placed on a turntable (which comes with the game). Determine which player will start.

Gameplay

Starting with the first player and going clockwise, each player either adds a stone to the board or passes. A player may only pass when he or she is unable to play any more stones; once a player passes, that player is out for the rest of the game, even if he or she could play a stone on a later turn. If a player can play a stone, that stone must be played. The game ends once every player has passed.

There's a few other rules that govern stone placement:

* In the first round of play, the first player places any stone. Every other stone must have at least one face touching the face of another stone on the game board, and at least one face touching the board itself.
* In the second (and every other) round of play, every stone a player places must have at least one face touching the face of another of his or her own stones on the game board.
* Stones have to line up with the grid and cannot extend past the grid for the current board.
* A stone cannot be played such that there is empty space underneath any part of that stone.
* The stones must conform to the height limits for the board (based on the number of players) and the specific square (some boards have different heights for different parts of the board).

With four players, the game takes about half an hour to play.

Scoring

Once the game ends, look at the structure from above. You score 1 point for every square of your color that you can see. Each player then loses one point for each unplayed stone. The winner is the player with the most points; the loser knocks over the structure so there isn't any evidence of the results.

Theme

The feeling of building something significant really comes through for me in this game. Sure, that staircase you made may have gaps here and there and might not be OSHA-approved. But the tallest structures, built when the game is played with four players, give a sense of creation on a level with Cleopatra and the Society of Architects. Or Mouse Trap. Although I don't think that the Incans used quite as colorful bricks in their structures. But I could be wrong.

Thoughts

I enjoy this game. It's fun when you figure out just which stone to play to maximize your points and block all the other players, so you don't have to build to the max height. It's just as much fun when you realize you played that stone already, so you need to come up with a different solution. It's difficult to control the whole board, but if you can visualize it, you can place stones so that the opponent building in the same area either doesn't have a legal play or you can take advantage of whatever they do.

Overall, Rumis is a solid light game that plays fast and keeps people interested.