Kickstarter Preview: Pyramology
I recently had the pleasure of playing a pre-Kickstarter game by a new publisher and all-round Nice Guy Jonathan Brough, and I am really pleased that I did.
Pyramology is simple to play, but hard to master. Part puzzle game, part indiscriminate other player stitch-up, and all great fun.
The aim is to score points by placing your pyramids with the matching colour and number in a 3x3 grid. “Sounds easy” I hear you say… well it is. But once you have placed 2 pyramids next to each other, you can start building upwards too, and things start getting complicated.
Once you have completed the base and all four sides to the pyramid, you may also have the opportunity to “crown” the pyramid and keep building ever onwards and upwards in your quest to score more points than your friends.
Also, the end of the game signal is very clear. The first person to either place all of their pyramids will trigger it, or if each player cannot place a pyramid for one turn, then it’s all over.
In the interests of research...
In the interests of research (and absolutely nothing to do with me wanting to play it – a lot), I played this game with a diverse range of people to get different viewpoints. I played with a bunch of gamers, both of my kids separately (a 9 year old and 12 year old), my long standing gaming buddy and even my mother in-law.
Through playing with all of these people, something very interesting happened. Every single one uttered the words “This is sooooo clever” at some point during the game, and they’re not wrong. Jon has come up with something quite special in that Pyramology is hugely accessible and also really great fun to play.
So what do I give Pyramology out of 10?
A super solid 9. If I could find a better way to keep score then it’d be a perfect 10, but since the game is rife for customisation and house ruling, I’m sure that I can come up with something. I love it and will play it for as long as I can get away with before mass production. Kudos to John for coming up with something so cool!
The play scales well between player counts as you just have a different amount of pyramids to try and dispose of and maximise your score from, but one thing which I found highly interesting, is also the ability to customise your game.
We played it normally by choosing random pyramids and having them in front of us so that we could plan our turns. We played it by randomly choosing pyramids from the bag for each turn and believe me – it made a very different game. We played it where we only had 3 pyramids in front of us to choose from at all times instead of all of them, and the best thing? They were all really good fun to play.
I can’t get through a review saying that everything is Unicorns and Rainbows though and there is just one thing that I find clunky about Pyramology… keeping score. The game is due to come with a notepad to keep score, but whilst it works fine, I am sure that there must be a better way of doing so. Still, that aside, I have had so much fun playing Pyramology that I will be backing it once it hits Kickstarter without a doubt.
