Saturday, July 14, 2007

Gaming With Grandma - 25

My Mum (Grandma to our kids) was ill last week so we didn't get a chance to play any games together. This week, however, she was feeling a bit better so popped around for her usual Saturday morning visit.

My wife, Deb, had visited a few garage sales in the neighbourhood this morning and had brought me home a new shrinkwrapped copy of Tri-Ominos which she'd bought for $1.00. Mum and I decided to sit down and try it out.

Apparently it's similar to dominoes (which I've never played), but this time the pieces are triangles instead of rectangles. Each triangle has 3 numbers at the points, so to place a piece next to it, it must match two numbers on the side. There are bonus points for completing a hexagon or making a bridge between two rows. It's not a bad little abstract and would be good for teaching kids to look for patterns. Instead of playing to 400 points we decided to only play until the first person reached 200 points. I won 326 to 166 which took two rounds.

2 comments:

Friendless said...

I have a copy of Triominos which I haven't played. Why is it interesting?

Ozvortex said...

I found it interesting how I had to rotate the tiles in my mind to see if they could fit anywhere. I'm still trying to figure out if there is a strategy - like trying to set up positions to win bonus points by laying down my tiles in certain order. As the first player to use up their tiles first is the winner of the round then it will be the person who is best at recognising places to place their tiles who will do better. If you can't (or think you can't) place a tile then you must pick one up from the remaining pieces to see if you can place that new tile. Unfortunately, picking up a new tile means negative points and missing out on reducing your overall tile count. Players could suffer from AP as a result so a timer would come in handy. Interestingly it's a game where there is no playing board, as such, sort of like Hive. I can't compare it to normal Dominos because I've never played it. I gave Tri-ominos a 4 on my BGG rating. I guess it would be a passable 'family' game.