Designed by: Gavin Birnbaum
JamSumo is a dexterity game of flicking dice into a hole – or, to be clearer, Jam is a game of aiming for the hole, and Sumo is a game of avoiding it.
The board is hand-built out of hardwood and comes with 4 sets of six coloured dice. Both games are simple: in Jam, all your dice start off the board with a face-up value of 4. On your first turn, you place a die on any Jam zone of the board (feel free to rotate it) and flick it, aiming for the hole in the middle. On subsequent turns, you can either do the same or – if you have other dice present on the board – flick one of those instead. As soon as one player gets all their dice into the hole, all remaining players score the face-up value of their dice: points are bad, so after one round per player, the fewest points wins.
In Sumo all your dice start with a face-up value of 3 in the Sumo zones, and on your turn you flick one; the objective being to knock your opponents either down the hole or off the side of the board. As soon as one player is knocked out, all remaining players score the face-up value of the remaining dice – and in Sumo, points are good! Like Jam, you play one round per number of players, but unlike Jam, most points wins.
Lots of victims here. You're either being one, or creating one.
Exceedingly minimal.
None to speak of.
If you like the slightly madcap play of Jam (or Sumo) then its lightness of play and rules make it eminently revisitable.
2-4
Players
6+
Years
30-60
Mins
Sam says
It's not a cheap game, but it's quite a beautiful object - and sturdy enough to survive regular trips to the pub or elsewhere. And it's costly not because of a big mark-up, but because each copy is hand-made by the designer, who also produces several other games from his workshop in the UK. And I get at least double the joy and fun from a game of Sumo (or Jam) than I do a three or four hour slog through Monopoly or Risk. - I can guarantee you several cries of Noooooo as well as Yesssssss as things go spectacularly wrong/right for you. I couldn't play it for hours and hours though - it's emotionally exhausting!