Base price: $XX.
2 – 6 players.
Play time: ~20 minutes. More with more players.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 2
Full disclosure: A preview copy of RNSM was provided by Button Shy. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game.
Welp, still stuck in the airport. I wrote these reviews in the opposite order and, after an hour’s delay, it doesn’t seem like I’m writing this review at home either. So you’ll get the joyous benefit of getting to read my Irritated Airport Thoughts in addition to this review. Thankfully, I wrote the actual analysis parts first so this frustration won’t affect my score. One day, I’ll likely move away from scoring reviews just because consistency is becoming increasingly hard to maintain and it’s hard to figure out what to do if my opinion on a game changes over time. I’ve already mentioned elsewhere that Sprawlopolis and Cake Duel have both risen in my esteem, for instance; I’d love to revisit them some day. We’ll see; I already have too many games in the backlog for that to feel responsible, right now. Oh well. In the meantime while I wait to board, let’s check out what Button Shy’s got going on.
In RNSM, the job’s done and you almost got away, but one of your crew accidentally got the fuzz’s attention! Not a great day for you, criminal. Now, through the power of spelling, you’ll have to throw your co-conspirators into the fire so that you can get out unscathed. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes there’s no honor among thieves. Will you be able to get away? Or will this entire fiasco spell disaster for you?
Contents
Setup
Pretty much none. Shuffle the cards up and deal each player three cards. If you’re playing with two players, deal each player an extra fourth card. Flip the top card of the deck face-up and you’re ready to start!
Gameplay
This one’s pretty simple. First player to run out of cards wins!
On your turn, first draw a card from the deck. Then, either play or Challenge.
If you play a card, just place it before, after, or between any letters. You can move the letters farther apart but you can’t change their ordering. Your goal is to create a sequence of letters that can form a valid word. VLD, for instance, might spell VALID or VALIDATE or VALIDITY, but it can’t spell DIVULGE. Afterwards, if there are no cards remaining in the deck or discard pile, you must give an example of a valid word using the central letters. If you can, discard a card; if you can’t, the previous player discards a card. Either way, the round ends after that. Otherwise the next player goes.
If you choose to challenge instead, the previous player must say a valid word using the sequence of letters in the center. If they can, great, they discard two cards. If they can’t, you discard two cards. The round ends either way on this one.
When the round ends, if a player has no cards, they win! Otherwise, shuffle the central letters, discard pile, and deck together and start a new round with the player who previously discarded cards.
Continue playing until one player wins!
Player Count Differences
The game can change a decent amount with more players, just because there’s more input happening in the center and there are more cards out of play in players’ hands. With more players, you actually see a pretty nice outcome, which is a player running out of cards and being able to just name a word and score a point, rather than the bluffing-centric ending you might see with fewer players. Plus, you gotta stay more on top of things with more players, since the possible words are going to change a lot between your turns. I actually lean towards the higher end of the player count spectrum, as a result.
Strategy
- It’s not necessarily wise to try and all agree on spelling the same word. If you do that, you’re essentially playing a game of “who will draw a card they can’t play first?”. Maybe that’s something you want to do, but I tend to prefer trying to create a wide swath of options that the word could be and then slowly whittle it down from there.
- Prefixes and suffixes are not only great ways to spell words, but decent bluffs if you want. You may know that LIBERALS is a word, but is LIBERALISTS? DELIBERALIZE? My word processor is telling me no on that second one, but it’s a decent bluff, especially if the next person tries for DELIBERALIZING, which is another perfectly reasonable bluff. When in doubt, add a prefix or suffix.
- I generally just wouldn’t recommend bluffing, though. I think it’s too risky! All you have to do is decide if you can play another letter on the word in front of you. If you don’t think you can, then either you’re unlucky or it’s a bluff. And given that there’s no real time management element of this game, I think players are likely to think through your bluff eventually.
- Be mindful of which cards you’re discarding, when you get to discard. You may want to get rid of letters you’re going to have more trouble using, or at least, don’t just throw away cards at random. That R / S / T / L / N / G card could come in handy.
- It’s also a good idea to get rid of trickier letters when you can. I try to get rid of nastier letters so that I’m not stuck with them in the long-term. Sometimes you just end up unable to play anything if you’re not careful.
- It might be worth trying to throw some wrenches in other players’ gears if they have fewer cards in hand than you. Throw a nasty letter in there! Make a weird bluff! If you’re going to lose if you don’t do this, then you might as well.
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- Great portability. That’s the Button Shy advantage; I usually have 10 or so of their wallet games on me when I travel.
- Very easy to pick up and play. You just need to try and spell words with the letters in your hand. It’s challenging for your vocabulary, not because the rules are particularly complex.
- Not a huge footprint, either. You can play this one on a plane, is usually my metric for that. But since the cards are largely in-hand and you can just … play them in a row, it shouldn’t be too tough to play this one anywhere.
- I love a word game. It’s one of my favorite genres and yet I don’t get to play it nearly as often as I would like. Just such a delightful game type.
- There’s a lot of variety just in how the cards come out and what words you can spell from them. That’s the beauty of the vowel-less play style; there are so many words you can make up if you just jumble some consonants and let players free-flow in other letters as they want. It’s such a good system.
- I really like the art style for this one. It’s clever and a bit punk rock. Looks great.
Mehs
- I kind of wish there was an option between “bluff” and “play”, especially if I know I can’t make a valid word with my letters. I get that part of the challenge is, as the game progresses, you suddenly don’t have as many options vis a vis letters and placement, but it feels bad to make an obviously-bad bluff for players who aren’t quite as interested in the bluffing component as they are in the word game component. I’d love to be able to just resign, reset, and then go first after having to take an extra card or something. The penalty for a failed bluff feels pretty steep, as well.
Cons
- There’s something to this game about speed and timing, and it doesn’t quite land, for me. If you don’t have a timer, then you end up watching players agonize over what word they might be able to spell from their hand. They also have near-infinite time to call you out on your bluff, at which point it makes bluffing feel pointless. If you do have a timer, then it’s the opposite problem: players with larger vocabularies are rewarded because they can come up with word options fast (to say nothing of the various other challenges speed-spelling brings into play).
- Honestly, more generally, the bluffing doesn’t really make sense to me. There’s a couple issues here. For one, I suppose I could double-bluff by adding on to another player’s bluff, even if I can’t spell a word with the letters in front of me, but that feels pretty easily seen through and needlessly risky (especially at two players?). Also, there’s an in-between step. If you’re not bluffing, I may still not be able to spell a word with my letters. That’s how it goes sometimes, but here you have to force bluff, where you have no choice to bluff and that feels bad, especially if the other player, again, has infinite time to determine if your bluff is a real word. You’re relying on there being a gap in their knowledge, which doesn’t feel great for the player who makes the mistake. It can make them feel … dumb. Don’t love that! In games that are more bluff-heavy, like Cake Duel, for instance, the bluffing works because there’s a deck of unseen cards and you might have some information, but you can’t necessarily know what’s in front of you unless you have the exact right cards. That’s fun. Here, the limited information is more dependent on an out-of-play skill, “how many words do you know?”. I don’t think that works.
Overall: 5.75 / 10
I’ve played a ton of Button Shy games; they can’t all be my favorites. This one didn’t entirely land for me. That’s not to say I thought it was bad! I just didn’t leave my games feeling like it was an entirely good experience. There are some fun parts, granted: I do always enjoy the consonants-only free spelling challenges. There’s also something routinely great about Button Shy’s entire presentation: small game with few cards and a lot to do. You can get a lot of fun vocabulary in there (or, at least until someone starts just annoyingly appending prefixes and suffixes). Plus, the actual challenge around letter insertion is great. You can really shake up a word if you suddenly slam a consonant in there; it makes it very challenging to predict what the word will look like by the time it gets back around to you. That’s also a bit of an issue, just since sometimes you get the tail end of a set of plays and it’s extremely hard to determine if you can play. I’d love something of a “pass” option where you admit that you can’t make a word but you’re not required to call the previous player on their bluff. Sometimes you just can’t make something because the word is essentially complete or you don’t have the best letters in your hand. It’s nobody’s fault. I do like the art style a lot, though! It’s very legible and fun in the “cut from a magazine” style that RNSM pulls its name from. I’d just be interested in seeing if there are ways to tweak the game so that it doesn’t feel as dependent on who gets the right cards or knows the most words, I suppose. If you do want a vocabulary challenge, you’re looking for a portable game, or you just like the aesthetic, RNSM might end up being a good time for you! I’d still like to see an evolution or iteration on it.
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