Tomatomato

Tomatomato is an exceedingly silly game of saying the word tomato or its component parts (to/ma/mato – Japanese for door/devil/target) in increasingly lengthy combinations.

In the box is a bunch of tiles representing the aforementioned syllables and occasionally, a fully-formed word: tomato. A die is rolled to determine how many tiles will be flipped over each turn (between 1 and 3), and play begins. The starting player flips tiles and begins laying them out in a row: the player to their left must pronounce the word created by the row. Then they flip tiles themselves for the player to their left, who must pronounce the now-longer word – with no hesitation or stumbling. Occasionally a tile will be revealed with an arrow on it, and when this happens the word must be read in reverse – for instance, to-to-mato-ma-to-tomato becomes tomato-to-ma-mato-to-to.

Play continues in this manner until someone inevitably stumbles in the pronunciation, or hesitates too long. At this point all the other players count in: ready-steady-go! and simultaneously put their finger on a tile to claim it for themselves: tiles that can spell ‘tomato’ are worth a point at the end of the game, so while to, ma, or mato tiles can combine to score you points, obviously a tomato tile is more alluring, as it scores a point automatically.

The catch here is that if more than one player places their finger on any tile, nobody gets it and instead it is discarded.

Then any identical tiles in the row that are adjacent get stacked on top of each other, and a new round begins: the die is re-rolled by the player who stumbled, new tiles are flipped, and the player to their left attempts to pronounce the word. This continues until the tiles run out and the player with the most ‘tomatoes’ at that point is the winner. The rogue Potato tile is in there to trip you up, and isn’t worth a point but does break ties!