Pickomino Board Game First Impressions
Pickomino is a fun game which is as frustrating as it is odd.
But it’s designed by Reiner Knizia so it can’t be bad…
I’m not really a fan of dice rolling or push-your-luck style games but this one was different.
Two to seven players 8 and up try to obtain fried worms for their chickens, so that they don’t go hungry. Of course, anyone who doesn’t manage to grab a worm off of the grill can help himself to those of his opponents.
So yeah… Chickens and Worms.
There are domino-like blocks in the centre of the table which are numbered from 21 to 36.
21-24 has 1 worm on the bottom half of it, 25-28 has 2, 29-32 has 3 and 33-36 has 4
There are 8 dice, each numbered 1-5 with a Worm where the 6 would be.
A Turn
You roll 8 dice and choose to keep either ALL the dice of a single number of your choice or any dice with a worm on.
Then you may roll again doing the same thing but:
- you can’t keep dice of a number you have already taken
- you can’t keep worm dice if you have already taken them that round.
So then you repeat this process until you dare not roll anymore. You then add up the numbers you collected IF you have one worm. You take one of the Domino-style tokens from the middle of the table and that ends your turn.
Play continues like this, any additional domino tokens you win stack on top of any you have gained previously.
But Pickomino does get interesting…
Failing
If you roll and are unable to keep any dice because they are duplicates of numbers taken earlier, you end your turn.
When/If this happens and you have kept a Worm, you return your top prize Domino to the middle of the table. Then, turn the highest value Domino face down, effectively removing it from the game.
If you stop rolling with a total equal to the value of another player’s top tile in their prize stack, you can take it and add it on top of your own.
Brutal!
When there are no dominos to take from the middle as they are all face down, the game ends and the player with the most Worms on their prize dominos is the winner.
Pickomino Summary
Very fun, will play it again despite finishing on 0 points 🙂
Also, check out Hick Hack in Gackelwack which is in the same ‘world’.
Jesta ThaRogue
