Sabre-toothed Seven

8. Mammut

By Kristian Amundsen Ostby

Players: 2 - 5
Ages: 8+
Time: 30+ minutes
Type of game: Social / Auctionish
Reccomended?: Yes

Seems like life in prehistoric times was a little more straightforward than it is now. You'd go out with your tribe hunting and gathering then split the spoils under the watchful eye of the tribe leader. Everyone shared the work and got their equal share of the spoils. Fair. Y'know, exactly like banking works now.

What if the tribe leader wasn't around and we were left to ourselves to decide how to split it? What's to stop me taking all of it? We need some rules to stop that happening. Let's see... If I have nothing in front of me I can take as much as I want from the central pile or take everything from somebody (who either has been too greedy or has what I want).

Seems fair? That's Mammut.

Here's the 2 boards. The far one acts as storage for the 7 sabre-toothed animals and a reminder of the various scoring options, the other is for keeping track of your score and furs.
You get thin and fat mammoths to mark your journey and another one to keep in front of you to:
A) remind yourself what colour you are
B) remind the other players what colour you are
C) play with
During the game you will find yourself doing mostly C.

Each round you'll upend a bag of tiles and leave them as they fall apart from separating them slightly so you can see what side is up. The first player takes what they want but tries to take little enough so that it's not stolen by another player. In our game 7 was decided as being the amount you could take without being acutes of being too greedy. Which meant we'd take 8-9 to try and push our luck.
With a number of ways to gain points and a couple of ways to lose points, you've got to get a good mix and keep an eye on what your opponents are picking up. But, as the tiles are double-sided you can never be certain of what you're going to get each round. So, although you can decide on a basic strategy you've got to be open to changing it.

Like The Resistance, the bulk of this game happens socially. Yes, you have the tokens in front of you to represent the choices you're taking but it's how you argue the fairness of those choices that really makes the game. That's where the fun of this really comes into play.

Also, there are sabre-toothed hamsters in this game.