How'd they get old enough to play this?
We've had a game make a reappearance in the family line-up over the weekend. Many of you have probably heard of it... it's Rummikub. It's a tile laying game that plays very much like you would play rummy, for card playing friends. You lay your tiles down in sets or runs, and the first person to be out of tiles wins. The fun thing about it, at least what I enjoy about it, is how you can move things around in order to play your own tiles. You can completely rearrange the tiles which are already laid down, as long as you maintain the set/straight rules.
Is that confusing? Probably, if you haven't played it before. Here's an example. There is a set of four 3's already laid out on the table. You have a red 1 and a red 2 in your hand, but you need three in a row of the same color before you can play them. So what you do is take the red 3 from the set that is already there, leaving a set of three 3's, which is still just fine, and use the 3 your took to form the straight you want to play. That is one of the simpler board manipulations. Sometimes people will completely rearrange things in order to play a tile. It's part of the fun, seeing how you can play a seemingly unplayable tile.
I will also be the first to admit, that games of Rummikub can become fairly cut-throat. At least in my experience, it is a game where the rules are resorted to more than a few time over the course of a game. One game of Rummikub goes down in family history with some of the inlaws (names have been omitted to protect the innocent, ie, me) having a particularly volatile game. Our spouses, who are siblings, all decided to leave. There have been a couple of games coming close to that this weekend, except with some 14 year old brothers involved. But trust me, it's fun.
Well, when some of the younger girls (G. and Y. in particular) saw some of us playing it, they really wanted to play, too. I hadn't even thought about getting it out and teaching them to play before this, because in my head they were just too little. They are evidently not as little as I thought. They have all mastered how to play, and have even started to figure out how to move tiles around to get the ones they need.
As I watch them figure it out, I am struck with what a great game it is to teach the idea of sets, and perception, as well as the concept of flexible thinking. In order to do well at it, you have to think about each tile in several different ways, as well as thinking about the tiles that are played in different ways. Just because a tile is part of a set right now, does not mean it can't become part of a straight in the next play. Just because there are six tiles in a straight does not mean they can't be broken up into two different straights. These are the exact same skills which make a person a good problem solver.
So, if you have never played the game, I highly recommend it. If it is sitting around, buried in your game closet get it out again. It's pretty fast, very entertaining, and not every game needs to allow time for vociferous debates about how the rules are supposed to be interpreted.
Is that confusing? Probably, if you haven't played it before. Here's an example. There is a set of four 3's already laid out on the table. You have a red 1 and a red 2 in your hand, but you need three in a row of the same color before you can play them. So what you do is take the red 3 from the set that is already there, leaving a set of three 3's, which is still just fine, and use the 3 your took to form the straight you want to play. That is one of the simpler board manipulations. Sometimes people will completely rearrange things in order to play a tile. It's part of the fun, seeing how you can play a seemingly unplayable tile.
I will also be the first to admit, that games of Rummikub can become fairly cut-throat. At least in my experience, it is a game where the rules are resorted to more than a few time over the course of a game. One game of Rummikub goes down in family history with some of the inlaws (names have been omitted to protect the innocent, ie, me) having a particularly volatile game. Our spouses, who are siblings, all decided to leave. There have been a couple of games coming close to that this weekend, except with some 14 year old brothers involved. But trust me, it's fun.
Well, when some of the younger girls (G. and Y. in particular) saw some of us playing it, they really wanted to play, too. I hadn't even thought about getting it out and teaching them to play before this, because in my head they were just too little. They are evidently not as little as I thought. They have all mastered how to play, and have even started to figure out how to move tiles around to get the ones they need.
As I watch them figure it out, I am struck with what a great game it is to teach the idea of sets, and perception, as well as the concept of flexible thinking. In order to do well at it, you have to think about each tile in several different ways, as well as thinking about the tiles that are played in different ways. Just because a tile is part of a set right now, does not mean it can't become part of a straight in the next play. Just because there are six tiles in a straight does not mean they can't be broken up into two different straights. These are the exact same skills which make a person a good problem solver.
So, if you have never played the game, I highly recommend it. If it is sitting around, buried in your game closet get it out again. It's pretty fast, very entertaining, and not every game needs to allow time for vociferous debates about how the rules are supposed to be interpreted.
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