Purrramid
- Board's Eye View
- Jun 5
- 2 min read
Reiner Knizia is almost certainly the world's most prolific game designer. There's often a mathematical element to his game designs. There's some basic arithmetic in Purrramid but really nothing more complicated than adding two single-digit numbers together. This is a game too that features lots of cute cats, courtesy of Ines Toczyska's art, but the feline theme is purely decorative. Purrramid is published by Lucky Duck and distributed by Goliath.
Purrramid is a push-your-luck game pure and simple. It's played with beautifully produced plastic tiles each of which shows a curled or stretching cat. The illustrations add to the game's appeal but they aren't really relevant to the gameplay. You start off with a pile of tiles and you're trying to be the first to get them all out. Do that and you get to place similar yellow cat tiles, and it's how many of them that you get out that will determine your end-game score.
The double-sided board shows a pyramid of tile-shaped spaces bearing various numbers from 1-12. On your turn you roll five six-sided dice and you place one or two of the dice rolled in a numbered space so that the total value of the dice placed equals the number in the space. You can end your turn there and then, in which case you just replace the dice with one of your cat tiles and the next player takes their turn. Alternatively tho' you can keep going: roll the remaining dice again and repeat. Watch out tho': if you roll dice and cannot legally place them, your turn ends and you don't get to put tiles down in the spaces where you previously placed dice. On the other hand, if you manage to place out all five of the dice, you additionally earn yourself an extra turn - albeit starting it with just four dice rather than five. You can also earn an additional turn if, on your turn, you manage to place cat tiles out on three different levels of the pyramid.
The placement rules are straightforward and intuitively obvious: you're building a two-dimensional pyramid of tiles so all the tiles you place on your turn must be fully supported by the tiles below them.
There's just a bit more. The game starts off with tokens on all the spaces for the number 8. Place dice on those spaces and you can take the token and use it to pay for a reroll. Successfully place dice in any number 12 spaces and you can stack three of your cat tiles there.
It all makes for a light, fun 20-30 minute game with just enough incentive for players to push their luck. Expect some punching of the air when a gamble comes off and much amusement among other players when the last dice don't go your way and your initially successful turn proves to be abortive.
The team at Board's Eye View have particularly enjoyed Purrramid as a relatively brisk two-player head-to-head but the game takes up to four players and is certainly playable as a family game. As you increase the player count, however, you inevitably increase the time players have to wait for their next turn. Just don't try stacking real cats!
