Can I Buy a Vowel?

Over the years, I've played plenty of board games that ask you to "play Tetris": to fit oddly shaped pieces in a tight space, obeying some placement restrictions. Usually, as in a game like Princes of Florence, this is a minor side activity nested within a larger game. Now comes a game where the "Tetris" activity is the whole game: NMBR 9.

NMBR 9 presents a tray of pieces shaped like all the single digits from 0-9. Well, pixelated versions of all the numbers, if you will -- they're all four squares tall, and two or three squares wide. A deck of 20 cards is shuffled, containing two of each number. Cards come off the deck one by one, and each player is giving a piece of the corresponding number to work into an individual puzzle they build. Each piece must touch another, and not just diagonally. You try to build upward, but each piece must touch at least two different numbers below it, and cannot overhang any empty squares.

After all 20 cards have been played, the highest-scoring puzzle wins. Every piece placed on "level 1," the table, scores nothing. Pieces on "level 2" score face value. Pieces on "level 3" score double face value, "level 4" triple, and so on.

Within these simple rules, some real placement challenges ensue, thanks to the shapes of the numbers -- perfectly crafted to create awkward spaces in your puzzle you have to work around. The overall strategy is clear: you want to put the biggest numbers you can on the highest level you can. But transforming that into a play-by-play strategy is tricky. The shuffled deck means you never know when the big numbers will come. How far should you build outward before you build up? How much effort should you put into the tightest placement possible? Is a gap or two worth it if you think you know what number you're going to place on top? And will your future planning hold up when you're trying to move on to the third level of your puzzle?

It's been a while since I've played a game that's completely abstract like this, no story wrapper at all. It's fun and pure... and fast to play, taking only about 10 or 20 minutes. And while I did enjoy it, I can't recommend it without reservation. It is, of course, a spatially-oriented game, and while there shouldn't be any more randomness in it than what comes from the cards, that amount of randomness isn't enough to truly disrupt the most spatially-oriented players. What I'm trying to say is, some players are just going to be better at this game than others, and that's a skill gap I doubt repeat plays could ever really close. That's not a bug in the purity of this game's design, but it could make it a bad fit for your particular game group.

Overall, I'd grade NMBR 9 a B+. Short and sweet, and calling on different thinking than many other games, I expect it will fill in between games on its fair share of game nights.