Board Games - Pyramid

Every such article deserves an enjoyable introduction, but what could be written about Pyramid? Therefore, let’s get to business right away.

It is a bit confusing. There is even a booklet with the "normal" rules of the game and a variant for experts and then again there is a piece with "new principles". These partially replace the "normal" rules. The expert rules are left out of the question for now.

Goal of the game 

Place as many pyramids on the board as possible and thus be the first one to have only one or two cubes. Then you win.

Preparation 

The cubes are distributed to the players and placed behind a screen. The dice have different colors and values.

Note: It is mentioned in the manual how many dice each player gets, depending on the number of players. But there is no mentioning with regard to how they are to be distributed. The presence of a bag suggests that all cubes are mixed in this bag and each player pulls out the appropriate number of dice from there.

How to play 

It is actually very simple to play this game. A pyramid is needed here and one that is built from four cubes on the hexagonal game board. It is important to follow some rules. Three dice are the basis and there should be a cube on top.

Old ground rules 

The values of the base cube are added and the number on the fourth cube must be the final digit of the sum.

All four dice together give the value of the pyramid.

A player starts with four of his dice and the next player can now build a separate pyramid also using four blocks. The important thing is that the value of the pyramid, i.e. the sum of all four dice, is higher. The construction of a pyramid is carried on until the color of the dice comes into play and then the value of the highest-ranking color is taken into consideration. There is no possibility of a draw in this case. Once a player has only one or two cubes behind his screen, he yells "Stop" and he has won the game.

New ground rules 

The colors play a much larger role in this case. The first player also builds a pyramid. Then, the second player has to get a higher point score than the first player. However, they must pay attention to the colors. The new pyramid is higher than the first one if there are 3 modules of the same color, 2 blocks of a higher-quality color or 2 blocks of the same color but with a higher numerical value. The total number of cubes with higher values but different colors is not provided apparently.

Conclusion 

You might be extremely disappointed when you open the box for the first time. Instead of clear cubes with clearly identifiable numbers and clear instructions, the game box may contain items the colors of which remind you more of soap. And the numbers are only impressed with colors, not printed. The result is that it can be very difficult to read the numbers during the game. It is written on the back of the game box: The color and contents of this game can be changed by d & g, but still.

You might have some problems when you read the game manual. The "old" rules of the game can be understood, but they are written in lower case. The new ground rules, however, are indeed easy to read, but not really understandable, at least not at the first and second reading. Quote: The first player builds a pyramid with 2 green blocks with the total number of points 25... What? A pyramid made of 2 blocks? It would have been better if it said: The first player builds a pyramid out of four blocks, among which he uses 2 green...

And what is the bag for? It must be written there somewhere. 

The game idea is quite clever. And if all the players have good eyes, the first version is quite fun. But most of the game may be tough. Maybe we all just ponder too much or are too computationally weak, but people are used to games that last much longer than 5 minutes as stated on the game box.

But there are also positive aspects. The game box is filled real tight and no space is wasted. The view screens are also really stable