Pickomino

Imagine that you are at a chicken BBQ party, and you need to get some roasted worms for your chicken (yuck). Your goal is to get more worms than everyone else...

Pickomino (also known as Heckmeck am Bratwurmeck) is a small dice game designed by Reiner Knizia, published by Zoch Verlag and Rio Grande Games. It is a little push-your-luck dice game, where you are given 8 special dice when your turn comes. Each time you roll your dice you have to keep all the dice showing one (and only one) of the 6 numbers of which you do not yet have. If you roll a sum of 21-24 you get to keep one of the 1-worm tiles. 25-28, 2 worms, 29-32, 3 worms, 33-36 voila, you get 4 worms at once! If you happen to roll the exact amount someone did, you get his/her worms instead.

On the left is the BSW interface of Pickomino. That was a 4-player game. Unlucky day for me! In the first round someone took the 4-worm tile for 36. Surprisingly, I won that game.

In a glance the game looks very very simple, but after playing a few games online I begin to realize there are lots of decision to make. What do you do when you are lagging behind? The game will end when all the "public" tiles are gone, so you sometimes have to pick an opponent's tile just to prevent the game from ending too soon. That in turn means you have to engineer your dice results to match exactly one of the opponents' face up tiles. No, it is not a game where you roll the dice and hope for the best. Luck plays an important part, but it also requires you to find a strategy and pick your dice so that your strategy work. I would definitely get a copy if it were cheaper.