Reif fur die Insel

Reif fur die Insel is a bidding game where you collect bananas over three rounds, and each banana is worth points. There are two catches: one is that your bidding cards, once used, are gone from the game – and whatever you don’t spend is also worth points. The other is that these bananas are at different stages of maturity: brown bananas score at the end of the current round, yellow only at the end of round two, and green only at the end of round three: the final round! The entire game is thematically a ripening process.

Each player has a board where they can store up to five bunches of bananas. Several bunches are drawn randomly from a bag, and then everyone bids, or outbids or changes their bid to a different bunch, until finally everyone has compromised and are bidding on a separate banana bunch. The bids go back in the box and the banana bunches onto your board!

But! Because your space is limited (each round ends when the boards are full) having a lot of green bananas early on restricts your involvement in subsequent rounds, because they sit on your board taking up space until the end of the game. But on the other hand, they do tend to be high-scoring. Yellow bananas will also refuse to move until the end of round two, so in the meantime you have less room for more fruit.

That is almost the entire game. The only flies in the ointment are non-bananas that get pulled from the bad randomly as well: rotten bananas (minus points) bananas that only score if you have a set, parrots that eat bananas and so on. If you end up taking something bad, however, you can at least offset it by making sure people getting the good stuff pay a high price! Remember leftover bidding cards are points. The final wrinkle is you also have a zero bid card. You won’t get anything amazing with this, of course, but it does at least always come back to you, unlike the other bids.