 So it packs out. We needed a short game to play. I played this game at Connecticut last year. Yeah. And I did not because I was doing work. So you want to introduce the game then? Yeah. Okay. So it's a really tiny game. It's published by Mayfair who I guess used to publish that list. Yeah. It was a Wolfgang Kramer game. So it's a little tiny card game and it's called Six Nymphs. And it's there's actually a whole lot going on in this tiny card game. And most of the things I had to say about it are positive. Yeah. It's a it's there are a lot of little games like this, like no thanks, like all those sort of like, Hey, it's really easy to teach. Just start playing it. You'll have some fun. But usually those games do not hold people's attention. Like if I bust out no thanks, people really like it once, but no one wants to play it again right then and there. Yeah. Six Nymphs you can play quite a few times. I mean, I've taught this to people who were drinking and had been drinking and were yelling and socializing and not paying attention too much. And then they are really into the game. Well, the fun part of the game, right? So here's the, so you know, NIM, NIM is the game that rim likes where you have sticks and on your turn you pick up sticks and over picks up the last stick loses. So it's got that unstable, stable state, combinatorial game theory going on. Right. Six Nymphs is basically the same game. That's why it's called Nymphs. Right. It's just more advanced. There's a deck of cards numbered from one to 104 and there's four rows. And on your turn and everyone's simultaneously turned two to 10 players. Yeah. That's great. So many players. You take a card from your hand of random cards. Everyone has the same size hand and put it face down and then everyone simultaneously reveals starting with the lowest card. The cards are added to the appropriate row, the appropriate row being the row in which there is a, the rightmost card is lower than the card the person has played. And then amongst those rows, which of the cards is the highest. So if I play a 30 and one of the rows is a 29 and it's rightmost spot, my 30 is going there. Right. If I play a 74 and there's a row with a 94, a 63 and a 52, it's going in the row with the 63 because that's the highest number that's lower than my 70, whatever I just said. So and so you just keep everyone simultaneously reveals and plays cards out there. Pretty simple. That's the whole rules of how to play the game. But it's six nymphed. When you, if you play the sixth card in a row, meaning there are already five cards in a row and your card gets forced into that row, you take all those cards, you take all the five cards that are already there and your sixth card replaces that row and is now starting a new row. And when you take those cards, all the cards have little pictures of bulls on them. Some cards have more bullshit than others. Whoever has the least bullshit wins. So you don't want to play the sixth card in a row. Also the only other rule, if you play a card and the number on that card is lower than the rightmost cards of every row of all four rows, you pick a row to take. It could be a tiny row with only like one card in it, which would be awesome. There might not be a tiny row. There might not be a tiny row. And then your card makes a new row that is lower than all the other rows. And then everyone else's card, you know, comes out according to the rules. And then it's basically Hart's rules. You keep playing until someone hits 66 because six is a number in this game. Mm-hmm. And then whoever's the lowest score wins. If there's a tie, joint victory, it's a whole game. Right. So here's what makes the game really interesting, right? It's got some gops going on other than that, not all the cards are out. So you have like nothing changed. You've got 10 cards. You've got to play all 10. Everyone's got to play 10 cards. It's just which order you're going to play them in, right? So you're looking at the board state and there's like different moves you can try. For example, if there's not a lot of cards in the rows, maybe you could just try to get rid of your low cards and take some low points and then hope later in the round to be safe and other people end up taking the big cards. But if you have only high cards, the board could get a range, well, the table could get a range in such a way that all the high cards you have are very likely to take some old terrible row that's full of bulls. Right. Also, let's say you got the 104 in your hand, the highest card in the game. You could try to play it right away and that would basically go in the final row. Like so you say the final row has like a 54 in it. You could put the 104 right next to it and now anything less than 104 is going in row three. But let's say you think you can do it. And nothing new is going in row four at all because nothing's higher than 104. And now someone puts like a 90 something in row three and now every new card is going in like rows one and two and suddenly the game gets really hairy until somebody plays a super low card and intentionally takes row three and four and you can create this lockdown effect, right? So you have all these different ways you can play. You could like intentionally try to take those rows to like unlock the game and maybe you'll get less points now in order to get even, you know, to lower the total points you would have taken if you didn't open the game up or maybe you can just keep holding out hoping that someone else bites the bullet and ends up taking the nymph and then you can clear your hand and get zero points. And yeah, like think about that you play that strategy of I play the high number to lock something down. So I play the 104. What if all the other players play like 55, 58, six and then I just take the row and I'm completely screwed. Sometimes there'd be only a little bit of space between rows and like you have the card that fits there and like and it's like, there'll be a 94 in a row and the next row has like 100 in it. So the only cards that can go in that third row would be like 95, 96, 97, 98, 99. It's only like five or six cards, right? And there's four cards in the row. Someone else is like, I'll play my 97 and then it'll go right there in that row and there's no way I'm taking that row because no one's gonna play any card, right? And someone else is gonna have to take that row and somebody sneaks in with like one of the two cards that could have fucked you and now you take that row. It's like, ah! What is fascinating is how drastically different the game is with every number of players. Oh, huge difference. The three player game and the four player game. Tremendous differences. Might as well be different games. Oh yeah. I feel like, I think. When you play, once you get to six players that makes the biggest gap because suddenly you can just boom, oh actually with five players because every row already has a card in it, right? As soon as you get to five players, it changes drastically because if everyone plays a card for the same row, you can just play something that looked totally safe and end up taking a whole bunch of cards right away. Yep. Like in three and four player, there'll be rows where everyone is guaranteed to be able to play something safe and as a result, the game will often get locked up pretty quick and then it'll come down to did the person who locked it up have cards to make the game cycle where they will every round take no points and someone else will take a bunch of points which we saw happen reliably. There was always one person who just got wrecked in that situation. I mean, I can't say this game is a lot of strategy but it also has a lot of luck, right? At the beginning of the game, you deal out what, 10 cards to every player? Yep. And there's 104 cards in the deck. So if you've even played with the max of 10 players, there's four missing cards, right? But there is significant luck. If you could just get like all low cards, it could happen. But. There's no reason to couldn't have. You can get a really bad mix of cards such and that you're just screwed. But playing multiple games and all that actually helps a lot. The fact that you keep playing games of it. Yes, because it's not, it's not one round doesn't determine the whole thing, right? You play until someone gets 66. So even if you get screwed one round, you play enough rounds that theoretically, if you're good at the game, you're going to win because it evens out over the course, right? It's, you know. Yep. Yep. So what makes the game super fun, even if you don't get to the deep strategies and everything is just that nymph mechanic is like an exciting hot potato kind of deal. The drama of this, this row building up with a bunch of bulls in it. And who's going to, is someone going to take it? Is somebody forced to take it? Because they have a bad card. They're just holding out waiting to play. Like you'll play around where everyone's cards go out safely. And then everyone's like, oh no, oh no. Because there's a bunch of full rows. It's like when someone takes the big row, it's like the hot potato exploded on them. Like, oh. It ends up being a really high drama game. Like people get really intense about it. Right. What really increases the drama even more is that every card doesn't have the same number of bulls on it, right? Some cards have just way more bulls on them. So it's like you could have a row and even only with two cards in it could have more bulls than a row with like five cards that only have one bull each. And that could be like, so someone could end up like taking that and it really sucks, really sucks. So I guess what I'm really amazed by even more than that is the mechanical. It's a sound game. It's quick to play. But people really like it, even though when you first show it to them, they see these hundred and four. You like, you tell someone. Yeah. All right. It looks way. This game has cards numbered between one and a hundred and four. And people say, fuck that. And the only thing that's fun appearance-wise and aesthetically is like the art is a little bit fun, right? And it's, you know, but it's just like outlines of bullheads. It's like there's not much going on there. It's, you know, like other games of like cute graphics or animals or kind of characters. It's like, it's just bullheads and numbers. You kind of get to row people in and be like, hey, I'll teach you the game and you can teach it so fast. I just thought it to you. Usually when we teach board games, we'll give sort of an explanation on this show, but not go into every detail. I literally told you a hundred percent of the rules in this game. But what makes the game great, the reason you can play it with people, even if they're distracted, even if they're drunk, like no, you know, all you do is play a card. There's no other weird decisions to make. And then everything after the playing of the card is not decisions, but just execution. Yes. If one person can do the execution, and then it just is not, is drunk enough, is least sober enough to not, to do the execution. So think about that. All you have to do is pick a card from your hand thinking. And once everyone's ready, it's simultaneous reveal. And then there's no more thinking. It's just play out what happens. Play out the drama. And you do a 10 times game over. Yep. Now with 10 players, you've dealt out a hundred cards. The four left are the ones that start the row. So you know that you pretty much know that every card's out there. So then it becomes multiplayer gops, effectively. Yeah, because you'll see like, well, there's a 94 and a 97. I could try for the 96, but I know the 95 exists and is in someone's hand because it hasn't been played yet. Yep. So the only counting cards becomes a big deal because once a row is taken, you got to remember what was in there. Yeah. But at least unlike gops, one person might have the 96 and the 97 and the 98. Like, you don't know. It's not like everyone has the same hand. That's entirely possible. Yes. Because the thing about gops to make it a hundred percent pure is that everyone has the exact same hand as well. But if you need to get made note, this replaces no thanks for me as the, Hey guys, want to play a quick game at a con? Like, let's just go play game. Spot it or this? They're like perfect for this purpose. Also, you can get this game way cheap. I remember at PAX, they had it at the Mayfair booth, like stacks of it. And it was like mad discount. I think I paid like four bucks for my copy. Yeah. They're trying to get rid of these. You can, you can probably get two of these and give them these gifts. Great gift. Great gift for someone who would play some games or even non-gamer type. Yeah. And you can, so cheap. This has been Geek Nights with Rim and Scott. Special thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music, Kat Lee for web design, and Brando K for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at frontrowcrew.com for show notes, discussion, news, and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one, but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience. But unlike those other late shows, it's actually recorded at night.