A clean and colorful duel, with very simple rules. It’s Rainbow, our board game of the week.
You don’t necessarily have to invent complicated rules or come up with a lot of material to make a good game. Rainbow is the proof.
Rainbow is only made up of cards, about sixty, with two different sides of one of the seven colors of the game. Each player receives three, the others are left in the card holder placed between the two players.
The way to hold his cards is important, since we should only see their front, but the opponent must see their back. Conversely, we see the back of his cards, while he sees their face. A game turn is extremely simple since it consists of putting down at least one card from your hand, and possibly a second and then a third.
When you play one of your cards, you decide to place it on the back side (the one whose color you know), or on the back side, blind. The goal is to build a rainbow, together with his opponent, but to be the one who places the sixth different color. We then win all the cards, and a new round begins.
But be careful, if you put or turn over a black card, you immediately lose the round. Same punishment if we reveal a color already present in the rainbow. On the contrary, the white faces help us since they count as jokers of any color.
Before placing your first card, you can choose to turn over one already in place. If we decide to place a second or third card, this time we must turn over a rainbow card. At the end of our turn, we draw to complete our three-card hand.
The game ends when the draw pile is empty, and the player with the most cards wins.
Why play Rainbow ?
Despite its rules which take a few lines and can be explained in thirty seconds, Rainbow clearly not lacking in interest.
It offers a balanced mix of randomness, memory and tactics. If we play a bit at random in the first part, we are much more involved in the following ones, and we take the time to think things through to play our cards.
Decide when and which cards to turn over, try to bluff your opponent, bet on luck by placing one of your cards blind, plan your next turn, since you see the first card you draw, etc.
On the other hand, you really have to stay focused throughout. At the slightest distraction (a message on his phone, the opponent asking a question, etc.), we forget what we saw on one side and on the other of the cards on the table, and it’s the panic. Studious atmosphere guaranteed.
A small box, extremely simple rules, games lasting around ten minutes, and yet Rainbow is much smarter than it suggests. Without being the game of the year, we can not help but redo a second part immediately after the first to get revenge. A characteristic generally specific to good games!
- Rainbowis a game by Mathias Spaan
- Illustrated by Yvonne Touss
- Edited by Piatnik
- For 2 players from 7 years old
- For games of about 10 minutes
- Priced at € 11.90 at Philibert
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