Designed by: Reiner Knizia
LAMA is a very simple card game where you’re trying to avoid picking up tokens…
Everyone is dealt six cards and your goal is to get rid of as many of them as possible. Players take turns laying a card face-up to the table, and the card you play must be equal to or one higher than the previous card. The cards are numbered 1 to 6, and after 6 the LAMA card is the wraparound – you can play another LAMA or a 1 on top of it.
If you cannot (or choose not to) play, you have two options – you can take an extra card from the deck into your hand, or you may pass. If you pass, you’re out of the round and cards left in your hand count against you. However, multiple cards of the same number are only counted once, so if for instance you passed with 5-5-5-2 you would only score 7. And that’s better than 17, because points are bad! You don’t want to be left with a LAMA card in your hand, as they are worth a brutal ten points!
However, if you did end the round with a LAMA card, there’s a way to mitigate the damage…
A round can end two ways – either when a player gets rid of their cards, or all players pass. If you manage to get rid of all your cards, you can return a points token to push your score back down – and that includes a ten point token you may have picked up for a LAMA card previously. If nobody manages to get rid of all their cards, though, and everyone passes but you – well, you can still keep playing – following the same-or-one-higher number rule – but can no longer pick up cards. When the round ends points are scored, tokens distributed, and the player who played the final card will begin the next round. When anyone reaches 41 points in tokens (or more) at the end of a round, the game is over, and the player with the fewest points is the winner.
I really enjoy this, despite a feeling that there may be very little in the way of meaningful choices in the game. Knizia's games often have some simple clever twist in them, and in this it seems to me to be the scoring chips. You want as low score as possible, as the first to 41 loses the game. The chips come in 1 and 10 point varieties, and players will accrue a pile as the game continues, unless they're very lucky/skillful. But if you manage to play all your cards in a round you can discard a single chip, and that could be a 1 or a 10! Clever!
None, although you can occasionally get hit by bad luck.
Very low indeed.
At first it seems like none whatsoever, but there are opportunities for shrewd play. Definitely not the game's key feature; but they're there.
It's random, it's fast-moving - it's fun!
2-6
Players
6+
Years
15-30
Mins
Sam says
Designer Reiner Knizia has designed literally hundreds of games and although not all are classics, they all - of the ones I've played - have some interesting and engaging aspect to them, from the complex kingdom-building of Tigris and Euphrates to the simple luck-pushing of Pickonimo. LAMA is even simpler than the latter, but still manages to be fun. It's laden with luck, but with just enough decision-making to make you feel like you might just - at some point - grab the reins on your own destiny.