6 Nimmt! (also known as Take 5) is a classic card game by Wolfgang Kramer and my most played game year after year. It was the starting point for my design of Potluck and one of the games I always teach new people when I meet with them for gaming.
It has many great things to it: it can play anything from 2 to 10 players (although I think 3 is a reasonable minimum and more the merrier), it can be taught in couple of minutes and has a nice balance of light strategy, mind games and randomness. So it’s a perfect casual / party game for moments when gaming is not the main focus but a nice activity when socialising.
In the game, each player is dealt a hand of 10 cards, then four cards are flipped face up in to the middle into four rows. Each round, each player selects one of their cards, plays it face down and once everyone has played a card, reveal them simultaneously.
The revealed cards are then added, starting from the smallest, at the end of the rows on the table following a single simple rule: a card is played to the row of which the largest card is closest smaller card than a card being added.
So in the image above, we start with 55 and play it next to the 50 (as 50 is the closest smallest value). Then 57 is played to the same row as is also 60. Finally, 99 is played to the bottom row after 94.
If a player’s card would be the 6th in the row, they take the row as points and leave their new card to form a new row. The goal of the game is to have least amount of points. These 10-card sets are played until someone goes over 66 points and the one with least points wins.
Another way a player may gain points is if they play a card that is smaller than any of the largest cards in the rows. If that’s the case, they choose any of the 4 rows to take to themselves as points.
The points are different than the values on the cards. Each card has some amount of bullheads on them: most of them have 1, the numbers ending in 5 have 2, cards ending in 0 have 3 and so on.
It’s a really fun game. There are a lot of other games that are more in-depth with strategy or lore or have more satisfying tokens to play with. But 6 Nimmt! is easy to pick up, fun to play and especially with larger groups of people, becomes quite a chaos which is so much fun.