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Boomer — 2006-10-18T18:00:43+00:00

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Boomer — 2006-10-18T17:56:17+00:00

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Boomer — 2006-10-18T17:55:48+00:00

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Boomer — 2006-10-18T17:55:43+00:00

Thread: Nymble - a review

Verseboy — 2006-09-10T16:44:57+00:00

Nymble – The Game of Equals and Opposites

The Backstory
I picked up Nymble (Karmel Games, 2006) because I was looking for another option to play with my family of four. Our 17-year-old daughter has Down Syndrome and, while she’ll occasionally play some of our lighter Euros (Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Citadels, O Zoo le Mio), she prefers Like It or Lump It or Scattergories. Our 15-year-old son often has to be goaded into playing our heavier games, but he’ll almost always sit down with us if Scattergories or Like It or Lump It is suggested. With that as my framework, I was looking for a game that fit into that class and might be a hit with the whole family. Nymble caught my eye because of the obvious similarities to Scattergories. I bought it without knowing anything else about it.

The Short Review
I whiffed on this one. None of us enjoyed the game as much as Scattergories. I do think there’s a game here for the right people. We aren’t those right people, though. I’ll explain below.

Game Play
Nymble is played by 2-6 players in 3 rounds. At the start of each round a letter die is rolled 9 times to determine the letters to be used in the round. There must be at least 3 consonants and 3 vowels. The players record the letters at the top of their own answer sheets.

The 3-minute timer is activated and players commence making words from the 9 letters. In the first round they are trying to make synonyms (words that mean the same thing). One word of a synonym pair must be from the 9 letters. The other word simply has to be a synonym of the first. If both words use only letters from the 9 given letters, the pair is worth 4 points. Otherwise it is worth just 1.

An example: The letters are Z-A-N-X-L-Y-U-Y-Z. One can find the word LAX among those letters. PERMISSIVE would be a synonym of LAX. That would be worth 1 point.

Any pairs that players have in common are disqualified. If 2 players had LAX/PERMISSIVE, neither would score. If, though, one has LAX/PERMISSIVE and another has LAX/LOOSE, both would score 1 point.

This format is continued through 3 rounds, except in the second round players are looking for antonyms (words that mean the opposite) and in the third round, they’re looking for homonyms (words that sound alike but are spelled differently like deer and dear).

Challenges
A red challenge piece is placed in the middle of the table where everyone can reach it. If a player reads out a pair that you don’t think qualifies, you can grab the challenge piece and issue a challenge. Grounds for a challenge are that neither word comes from the 9 given letters, the word from the given letters is misspelled, or the pair is not really (depending on the round you’re in) a synonym, antonym, or homonym. The challenger states the objection. The challenged player offers a defense. Then all the players vote on the challenge. Behind their own screens, they take in hand a red token, agreeing the pair is not acceptable, or a green token, agreeing the pair is acceptable. The tokens are revealed simultaneously. Majority rules. If the players are equally split, the challenge is upheld and the pair is disallowed. The challenger earns or loses 1 point, depending on the outcome of the challenge. The challenged player simply keeps or loses the word pair and its points depending on the outcome of the challenge.

At the end of 3 rounds all the points from word pairs and challenges are added up and the high score is the winner of the game.

Comparisons to Other Games
The most obvious comparison is to Scattergories, which is why I bought the game. Players have a set amount of time to write responses. Duplicate responses are eliminated. That said, for Scattergories is more fun. It’s easier to come up with responses in Scattergories where you’re just trying to find words that begin with a particular letter as opposed to words that contain only some of 9 given letters. It certainly wasn’t impossible, but it was more challenging and less fun for us. My daughter who has a very good vocabulary and knows by definition what synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms are, struggled because of the jumble word search nature of the quest. She came up with responses, but it was work rather than fun.

The word search aspect of the game is reminiscent of Boggle, a game we sometimes play as a family.

The challenges take on an Apples to Apples quality where people are cleverly stretching the bounds of reason to justify an answer. It was this lawyering aspect to the game that we liked least of all. The fact that challenges are so integrated into the framework of the game suggests to me that in playtesting too often the word pairs were tenuously connected, and it was leading to problems. We had a lot of challenges, and some of them resulted in acrimony. Remember, we were playing with a teenage boy!

We like in varying degrees all of the games to which I’ve compared Nymble. The combination of all 3 games into the singular Nymble experience isn’t as good as those 3 games individually.

Components
Nymble is from a small company, Karmel Games. The components are a mixed bag of quality. The answer sheets are well designed. The electronic timer is silent, unlike the annoying mechanical timer in Scattergories. The screens behind which you write your answers are cheap but serviceable. The letter die could be much better. The font used for the letters is difficult to read easily. The letters are lower case when upper case would have been better. Worst of all, the game comes with stickers that need to be applied over some of the die faces. I think (though I don’t know for sure) that after having the game out for awhile, they realized they needed more vowels in the mix. I would have preferred that they had figured this out before producing the components. Finally, the box is on the flimsy side; it’s deeper than it needs to be; and the top (on my copy) fits so tightly on the bottom that it is hard to open.

Conclusion
I think there’s a game here for the right people. We thought because of the word search aspect, it was more challenging (and therefore less fun) than Scattergories. The lawyering debates did not appeal to us. If you like those debates and want to tax your little gray cells more than you do in the average social game, Nymble might well be a good addition to your game library. Ultimately I didn’t like it, but I can understand how other people could.

I give it a 5 out of 10.

Steve Bennett

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Verseboy — 2006-09-10T15:48:37+00:00

Timer, Letter Die, Tokens, & Red Challenge Piece

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Verseboy — 2006-09-05T00:18:14+00:00

Cute Girl Holding Nymble Box

Game: Nymble

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Thread: Nymble - a review

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