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Nimble is the new game from publishers Pegasus Spiele. The game was created by Peter Jugensen with artwork from Christian Schupp. This game is a rapid reaction card game where everyone plays simultaneously. You rush through six literary classics: Moby Dick, Around the World in 80 Days, War of the Worlds, Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio and Don Quixote.
The game is designed for 2-4 players and is suitable for ages 6+, and takes up to five minutes to play. There's no excuse not to be able to fit in a quick game then! Let's take a closer look at this pretty looking, new game.
Nimble Gameplay
Sort the 120 cards into four sets according to the colour design on the back and give each set a good shuffle. Each player picks a set to play with and places any unused sets to one side. We played this with three people, so each of us placed one card face-up in the middle of the table which forms the three target stacks.
This varies depending on the number of players in the game. For example if there are two people playing then one player places one card face-up and another player will place two cards face-up. (No matter how many people play the game there will always be three cards face-up in the middle of the table for the target stacks).
The aim of the game is to be the first player to get rid of all your cards. Before you begin, the youngest player should decide on a starting signal. For our game my son decided he wanted to shout 'Go!'. You hold your set face-down in one hand and with the other hand you flip your top card over and place it down on the table to start a discard pile.
All cards have to go on the discard pile so you turn your top card over and place it on the discard pile and then you look to see if your card's frame colour matches a circle colour on any of the three stacks. If it does then you place the card onto that corresponding target stack, ensuring that you cover all cards beneath it. All your cards have to touch your discard pile before you can place them on the target stacks.
You can place multiple cards from your discard pile consecutively onto the target stacks. You can also take cards back into your hand in order to get to the cards underneath, if you can match them to the target stacks. As soon as one of the players has successfully placed all their cards onto the target stacks then the game ends and that player wins.
It is definitely worth going back through the target stacks to make sure that everyone placed their cards correctly. If you discover a mistake then the player who was playing with that colour set is disqualified. (The set colour is the colour of the back of the card.)
Final Thoughts
This game takes a few goes to get into the flow of things. It is played at such a fast pace that things can get chaotic and for the first few games we played much slower as we really had to concentrate on which bits of the cards we were matching and making sure that we put each card on the discard pile first. Once we got the hang of things with our six-year-old we managed to have a good few games at a much quicker pace.
The cards are very pretty and the colours have been cleverly picked out. Each colour is represented on the front of the box in the lettering of the game title. This way if you have anyone with colour blindness or anything like that you can check that they can distinguish between the colours. They have been picked so that everyone should be able to play without any trouble.
Nimble is a fun little game for families and as it requires very little set-up, is very good for those times when you are just trying to keep the family occupied for 10 minutes before tea! It is also perfect for non-gamers due to it being so easy to teach and pick up. If you are looking for a game with great depth and that requires a lot of skill, then this is not the game for you! The game is very simplistic and if I am honest, although I like the premise of the game, the six literary classics have no baring on the game at all. They do however, make the game look pretty!
Overall, Nimble is fun, silly, frantic and a great little speed game. It is very good for co-ordination, colour awareness and thinking quickly. The artwork is lovely, although when you are playing at speed you don't always have the time to stop and admire the cards as much as you would like to.
We enjoyed playing this and I think many families would enjoy playing this game. It is simple, speedy, family fun.
