Before El Grande, The Princes Of Florence, and Tikal — but after already snagging his first two Spiel des Jahres awards in the 80s — eminent game designer Wolfgang Kramer released a humble little card game called 6 nimmt!. Though it’s been released under many different titles over the years, such as Category 5 and Take 5, it’s likely still best known to the world under that original German title. It has been reworked/reimplemented/re-whatever-ed many times since its original publication date in 1994 (the most bizarre of which being The Walking Dead Card Game in 2013), due largely to its exceptionally clean and easily iterated upon system. In addition, while most light-weight card games from the mid-90s have long since faded into obscurity, 6 nimmt! has displayed impressive longevity with consistent print runs and sales. Today, despite its simplistic nature, 6 nimmt! remains one of Kramer’s best known designs and seems to have become something of a minor classic. That’s a laudable feat for any game, much less one with barely a handful of rules, so let’s take a closer look!
6 nimmt! is a simultaneous action selection card game lasting exactly ten rounds in which players attempt to add cards from their personal hands to one of four shared rows in the center of the table. Players start with ten cards, one for each round, and the cards are numbered 1 through 104 without duplicates. Distinct from this numeric value, cards also have point values (it’s golf rules, ladies and gentleman — points are bad).
Each round, players select a card and lay it face down in front of them. Once everybody has done so, the cards are flipped to reveal their numbers and added one at a time in ascending order to the shared rows in the center of the table. So the number of the card you play determines your turn order, no problem! But hold up, it also determines which row your card gets added to, which can be a problem. That’s because in order for your card to be legally placed, its number must be higher than the current rightmost card of at least one row. In other words, the rows too must be in ascending order.
In the not unlikely event that your card qualifies to be placed in two or more rows, it must always be placed in the row ending with the higher number. But — of course — there’s a catch: each row can only hold a maximum of five cards. Any player that, due to the above-stated rules, gets stuck adding a sixth card to a row must take the five cards preceding it and add them to their scoring pile (this is also where the game gets its title from — 6 nimmt! translated to English is “6 Takes!”). The card they played then becomes the first card of the row for future turns.
Another way players can be penalized is if they have no legal move on their turn because their card is lower than the rightmost card of all four rows. This isn’t quite so bad as the previous penalty because at least it allows you to choose which row you take. Afterward, just as before, the played card then becomes the first card of the taken row.
After the tenth round of this, in which all players play their final card, the game ends and everyone counts up the point values of the cards in their scoring pile. Most official rules have you play a few games in a row and score them cumulatively, stopping when one player’s score passes a certain threshold (forcing the last place finisher to bear the additional weight of being the end game trigger is a cleverly cruel touch from Kramer). At that point, whomever’s score is lowest wins. If there’s a tie, I suggest to keep playing games until it’s resolved. The tension such scenarios cause can be very good fun!
If this description makes it sound like there isn’t much going on in a game of 6 nimmt!, that’s because there isn’t, but I do not necessarily consider that a bad thing. 6 nimmt! is one of those games that does one thing, but the one thing it does is quite enjoyable. There are literally only two decision points in the entire game: 1) what card you play, and 2) which row you take if your card is too low to be placed. The second point is barely even a decision; it is nearly always the best move to take the row worth the fewest points (in rare cases you may be neck and neck with someone and taking a higher scoring row would cause them to score a penalty on their turn that is ultimately more valuable to you). That basically leaves us with one decision point: which card you play. Furthermore, cards are played simultaneously and face-down, so you don’t exactly have a ton of information to go on. Sounds boring, right? Well, not so fast. You do have SOME information. Two things, specifically: 1) the current state of the center rows, and 2) which cards others have played on previous turns. But even so, combining these two knowledge sets probably only gets you halfway (at best) toward what your optimal play is. The rest? Pure intuition, baby!
Your sole mental task in a game of 6 nimmt! is to try and intuit the impact other players’ selected cards will have on yours, so your card can safely make it to the center of the table. Which row are you trying to make it into? How many cards could potentially get added to that row before you have the chance to play yours? If a 4-card row’s last card is the 85, and you play the 87, are you going to emotionally be able to handle when the player across the table reveals the 86? Things are looking crowded, maybe you should play it safe with a single digit card and take the lowest value row out there, so you don’t end up getting stuck with something worse. These are the types of questions you will ask yourself during a game of 6 nimmt!, and it is a process that I nearly always find enjoyable. Each round feels like a miniature sojourn into the unknown, and returning from the chaos unscathed is always a satisfying relief. Dancing around disaster for as long as possible can be quite exciting, as long as you stay prepared for the inevitable catastrophe of a round that sees you saddled with a bucket of points! The emotional cadence of 6 nimmt! is fast, clean, addictive, and comparable to a good press your luck game even though mechanically it bears no similarities to one.
Ultimately though, there are plenty of limitations on 6 nimmt!‘s social impact. It is not a strategy game. Players have to enjoy a decision space greatly obfuscated by chaos and uncertainty. It’s also not really a party game, so don’t expect primo yuks. It’s slightly mathy, which may turn off you numerophobes out there. And at times the game can feel like nothing you’re doing matters, that even if you make the best possible play on any given round you can still get borked with a stack of high-scoring cards. I’ve heard that exact complaint from more than one person I’ve introduced the game to, and I think for the most part it’s perfectly valid. Even so, 6 nimmt! is an interesting and unique little card game that is easy to see the good in. It fits into that same general sweet spot as No Thanks!: light card games that successfully base their design around a single core decision, despite the intrinsic caveat that such a game insta-fails for any player that doesn’t find that decision entertaining. Remember though, 6 nimmt! is still being printed, released, and played world-wide. And if that isn’t a clear testament to the enduring fun people can have making the same simple decision over and over again, I don’t know what is.
6 nimmt! gets a rating of THREE out of FIVE, indicating it is WORTHWHILE.