Editor’s Note: Over the Christmas week the Meeple Guild will be offering up a game-a-day as a holiday treat. Enjoy!
YORKTON - An oft overlooked ‘game system’ is the rather common set of dominoes.
While dominoes do come in varied denominations – 12s being one typically used in the quite popular Mexican Trains game – the most often seen are sets of 6s. The common set is found all over – low-cost wooden sets even a regular item in ‘dollar store’ settings.
It’s a great purchase in the sense you can search out a number of games which can be played with a set of 6s – muggings coming to mind.
Another option – perhaps the best with a set of 6s we’ve come across – is Dave Ross’ creation Euronimoes.
To start Euronimoes is a print-and-play game for 2-4 players requiring only the rules (which include a playing mat), double-six dominoes, and a handful of poker chips (markers). This means it’s super simple to give a try once you have a set of dominoes. (Note, two double-six dominoes sets are needed for the 3-4 -player game.)
It is suggested it will take about 10 minutes per player to play, so two-player it’s a comfortable 20-minutes to play, so sort of a long coffee break game option.
Players in Euronimoes are trying to play their dominoes into their own personal area in such a way as to minimize their point count at the end of the game – yes less points is the goal here.
As noted on the designer’s blog, the pips in any column must form one or more sequential runs – at the end of the game, the value of a run is equal to its smallest number. A run of 6-5-4-3, for example, is worth three; a run of 4-3-2-1-0 is worth 0. And again, players don’t want points.
What is really needed here is that dominoes start in a ‘market’ and players have to buy the dominoes they play. It’s this aspect of Euronimoes that really creates some in-game decisions to set the game a notch above most domino offerings.
Euronimoes isn’t quite the social gem that Mexican Trains is for four or more, but since it plays with a simpler to access set of 6s, it’s an easy game to highly recommend – at least as a two-player offering.
