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Lowell Kempf
United States
Chicago
Illinois
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Dicke Damonen is one of those games that has been just off of my radar for years. With a board that is made up of basically four shoe-laces, it’s one of those games that periodically shows up on lists just because nothing else looks like it. It’s visually distinct game that hasn’t had much posted about it on the geek.
I have no idea when the creator posted the complete rules and gave folks permission to make their own copies but a few weeks ago, I noticed that he had. I printed the rules out and realized that it would be pretty darn easy to make. At that point, Dicke Damonen went from just off my radar to something that I had to make and play.
All you need, apart from the rules, are four loops in red, green, yellow and blue; ten pawns in each of those colors, plus ten white pawns; and a bag to draw the pawns out of. I used miniature colored poker chips for pawns, a bag I had lying around and spent a couple bucks for ribbons for the loops.
Okay, here’s the boring rules part:
The game is actually quite simple. You lay down the loops that that each one intersects with at least two other colors. The areas that the overlapping loops create is the board. A pawn can be placed on any intersection that includes a loop of its color but only one pawn per intersection. That includes the outer row of the whole board. White pawns are special. They go in the center of an area and freeze it so that nothing else can be placed there.
Each player starts with a hand of four random pawns. On your turn, you place one pawn in a legal position and draw a new one. However, once per game, you can bet on which color is going to come out on top. You place a pawn of that color in front of you, discard the rest of your hand into the bag, and then just draw one. Once you claim a color, no one else can claim that same color.
The game ends when someone can’t play any pawn in their hand. You count up the points for each color. You figure that out by counting the intersections and knots (I like how knots are included in the rules) for each area a color controls and add all those numbers together. If there’s a tie for majority in an area, no color gets any points. White is special. They don’t count at all for majorities and just score the total number of white pawns on the board. The color with the most points wins. If someone bet on that color, they win the game. Otherwise, everyone loses.
End of boring rules segment.
On paper, Dicke Damonen looked promising. However, the acid test was actually getting it on the table. When it comes to print-and-play, making the game is often the easiest part. Selling the other players on playing the game can be a lot harder.
To add to my doubts, my two outings with Heinrich Glumpler’s games have been a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, Ablaze was good enough that it spent some time as our go-to game while waiting for people to all arrive for D&D. On the other hand, my fiancée and I agree that Street Illegal is the single worst game we’ve learned together.
However, I pushed to get it one the table. The short playing time and the sheer weirdness of using ribbons for the board helped me convince folks to try it out, even though we suffer from chronic too-many-games-not-enough-time.
The short answer is that Dicke Damonen falls on the Ablaze side of the equation. It's actually a pretty good game and everyone who I’ve forced to played has liked it.
The two things that make it a fun game to play are the variable board and the brinksmanship.
The loops are more than just a cute gimmick. In addition to being neat to look at, they are what gives the game some strategic depth. Since you can twist the loops into figure eights, you can actually create some pretty complex shapes and you can make sure that every board is a new puzzle to crack. On the one hand, you can easily figure out how many points each area is worth and what colors have a shot at getting those points. On that other hand, your random hand means your cunning plans might not work out. After you bet and have a hand of one, you’d better hope you set up the board in your favor.
And the decision of what and when to bet is what gives the game all its tension. Bet too soon and you lose all control and watch people kill your color. Wait too long and someone else might swipe the color you’ve been building towards. While there might not be a way to directly attack the other players, you still have a lot of ways of messing with them.
The biggest weakness I’ve found in the game is that the outer rim of the board is worth a lot of points and whatever color gets control of it has been the winner in my games. It could be that that’s just part of the learning curve that we haven’t gotten past.
In the end, Dicke Damonen boils down to a quick game that you can fit into a jacket pocket that offers some genuine depth, particularly for how quick it plays. Plus, everyone in the room will look at you when you play it. It costs next to nothing to make so it’s well worth trying out. Even if you end up hating it, you’ll only be out a couple dollars.
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