G.Nome

Best with four players, G.Nome is a card game where the theme of scientists mapping the gnome ‘GNA’ is really secondary to the game-play, which is a fast-moving confection of calculation and second-guessing.

We’ll describe the four-player version here. Each player has a set of matching cards with numeric values of 1-9. Although you are trying to win individually, players forms two teams of two. A deck of cards showing GNA strands of several colours are placed centrally on the table, and the start of each round, three are flipped face-up. Players then each bid a card in order to take a GNA card: teams are allowed to confer as much as they like, but they cannot show each other their cards. When the four cards are revealed, the winning team (with the higher collective total) take the first card – the player with the highest card choosing for themselves – and then the player from the losing team chooses a card that the losing team share between them. Finally the second player from the winning team gets the remaining card for themselves. Ties result in no-one getting anything…

The game ends when the last GNA cards have been claimed and players score points for the amount of GNA cards they have in each colour squared: so lots of one colour is better than a smattering (but managing to get one of each colour plus the otherwise-useless white GNA cards is an instant win)

It’s a game of simple rules but a fair amount of complexity – not least the balance between team play whilst trying to make sure your team-mate doesn’t win.